Girl Scouts Offer New Badges for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math – NBCNews.com

The new group of 23 badges takes a progressive approach to STEM and also nudges girls to become citizen scientists using the great outdoors as their laboratory. Patrick Semansky / AP

Next year, another initiative will allow Girl Scouts to earn "Cybersecurity" badges. One study cited by the scouts showed women remain vastly underrepresented in that industry, holding 11 percent of such jobs globally. Another study, done by the Computing Technology Industry Association, found that 69 percent of women who have not pursued careers in information technology attribute their choice to not knowing what opportunities are available to them.

As for STEM overall, Acevedo said, a lot of girls remain vulnerable to a crisis of confidence in pursuing education and careers in those fields.

"A lot of girls haven't made that shift from using technology to, 'You can actually be a programmer,'" she said. "That you're the one who can make that coding. For a lot of girls, they need to have that hands-on experience so they feel confident."

The scouts, which are 1.8 million strong in the U.S., has offered such opportunities in the past but consider the new badges and related programming a major push.

"It's really all about how do we capture that interest in science and technology," Acevedo said. "The other thing is the girls are learning not just how to do a specific skill but also how to think, how to think like an inventor, how to think like a creator, how to think like a maker. Those are the types of things that we want to ignite in the girls."

Jennifer Allenbach, the scouting group's vice president for "girl experience," oversaw development of the new badges. Exposing girls to STEM by second grade is crucial in motivating them to continue, she said. As for the outdoors, the strategy is to move girls forward to dig deeper into such issues as conservation.

"Girls had a say in this," she said. "We reached out and asked what they were interested in and this is it."

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Girl Scouts Offer New Badges for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math - NBCNews.com