Ordinarily Extraordinary - Conversations with women in STEM
We’re Kathy Nelson and Linda LaTourelle — co-hosts of Ordinarily Extraordinary: Conversations with Women in STEM.
Kathy, an electrical engineer, launched the podcast in 2020 to share real, unfiltered stories of women working across STEM disciplines. Now with over 130 episodes, the mission remains the same: to amplify the voices of ordinary women doing extraordinary work in science, technology, engineering, and math.
We’re deeply committed to:
- Normalizing the presence of women in STEM by making their stories visible
- Building community for women who may be the only ones like them in their workplace
- Educating listeners about the wide variety of STEM careers — and what they actually look like
- Empowering growth and retention by addressing the challenges behind the leaky pipeline
From early-career professionals to experienced leaders, our guests share how they got started, how they’ve grown, and what they’ve learned along the way. This podcast is a space where women in STEM can be seen, heard, and supported — because representation isn’t just powerful, it’s essential.
Ordinarily Extraordinary - Conversations with women in STEM
99. E-liza Dolls - Eliza Kosoy; Founder of dolls that teach girls to code
Eliza Kosoy is the Founder of Eliza Dolls, a doll which teaches young girls how to code and build hardware through custom, tech-enabled projects based on things girls love. Eliza is also a PhD Student at University of California, Berkeley working in child development and Artificial Intelligence.
What do we talk about in this episode?
Eliza shares how she came to start E-liza Dolls and what her goals and aspirations are for her company. She also shares how her work in her day job as PhD student studying children and AI and how E-liza Dolls has affected her research.
- Eliza shares how starting E-liza Dolls will hopefully change future generations and encourage more girls to go into STEM fields.
- Girls play and interact with coding differently than boys.
- How does an idea become a prototype and then become a product? How do you find investors, factories, and get a product to market?
- Normalizing girls being interested in STEM and women going into STEM fields - this needs to be part of our everyday, normal lives.
- What is an angel investor?
Music used in the podcast: Higher Up, Silverman Sound Studio
Resources
E-liza Dolls - https://www.elizadolls.com.
An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertibledebt or ownership equity. (Wikipedia)
Girlboss, neologism popularised by Sophia Amoruso in her 2014 book Girlboss, which denotes a woman "whose success is defined in opposition to the masculine business world in which she swims upstream". The term became popular in 2014 after Sophia Amoruso used it with a hashtag prefix in her bestselling autobiography, which was adapted into a TV show of the same name. Its early usage was defined by perceived empowerment. Its popularity led to it becoming a "a template for marketing and writing about powerful women in virtually every industry". (Wikipedia)
Sophia Amoruso launches Trust Fund for founders - https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/19/sophia-amoruso-enters-venture-with-her-trust-fund-nasty-gal-girlboss/
"How Things Work" Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-things-work/id1524856935
