Ryan North Quotes

The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent - despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.

In high school, I didn't realize that science or engineering were male-dominated fields. When I got to college, and I was one of two girls in a 50-person class, that's when I realized that this was a unique decision I had made as a girl to go into engineering.

Girls need to see somebody that looks like them talking about science and technology.

The gender disparity in STEM is depriving our country of talented minds that could be inventing the next breakthrough technology, founding the next big startup or keeping our nation safe from cyberattacks.

So many young black women love science, technology, engineering, and maths. But that's not the widely held image of the kind of person who likes those things.

It's great to have female characters that have depth that you can explore instead of being the decoration or the girlfriend or the wife.

I think people get confused: people think 'strong female characters' mean you need to play an action figure.

One of the things that we've tried to do with the 'Guardians' films is to allow the women to be full characters.

It's so great to be able to inspire these young women today to get involved in male-dominated subjects.

For me, I was always the only woman in my cohort, first as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, then as a chemical engineering graduate student. There were very few women getting degrees in those fields at the time. My role models were men - great men role models.

All too often, female characters, in particular, aren't multi-layered enough.

All the other characters are so well-rounded, and it's just frustrating because female characters aren't. It's not that they're badly written, they're just underwritten. They have no internal monologues; they could be absolutely anyone.

Governments can make a greater effort to encourage computer science education, especially among young girls, racial minorities, and other groups whose perspectives have been underrepresented in AI.

Something happened to me when I wrote female characters in my early plays; it was a real liberation.

When we create female characters, I think often there is a tendency to kind of make female characters emotionally bulletproof.

We have a massive shortage of engineers and one of the big glaring holes is that we have so few women doing engineering - it's less than 10 per cent of the workforce.

I have always wanted to work with Lingusamy, as he is a master of commercial cinema. I have always admired his etching of female characters.

I have a terrific editor in Molly Mahan - she's the best - and Red Sonja has become up there with Black Canary as my favorite character to write, ever.

Sometimes, when you are one of only a couple of girls in an engineering class, you feel like you are representing women in general. That is a large burden to bear.

I think there's always a way to bring something, even if it is just the girlfriend role, as long as you're playing it with an idea of who that person is on their own, away from the male character.

Roles for women need to be better written.

A lot of times, female characters - particularly the villains - come off as very one-dimensional. They get the short shrift in that they're only given the snappy comeback, or they're relegated to a very stereotypical role. I want to know what's driving them - that's what's really interesting.

Let's be real: more often than not, Hollywood does not have three-dimensional characters for women to play.

For me, writing the 'X-Men' was easy - is easy. I know these people, they're my friends.

I was always looking for the female characters in sci-fi and fantasy who were more than just the girlfriend.