Rita J.
King, a futurist and executive vice president for business development and co-director of Science House broke all stereotypes by wearing a sparkly dress while delivering a talk to students at NASA in 2011.
She shared the picture of the sequined dress that she wore and wrote, ”Cleaning out my closet, I came across this gown and remembered the little girls who sent me a letter and asked me to wear something sparkly for a talk I gave at NASA so they could believe that scientists could also be sparkly.”
It was November 19, 2011, when she delivered the speech and she was a futurist at the National Institute of Aerospace, NASA’s think tank in Langley, Virginia.
She bought that sequined dress specifically to wear for her talk eight years ago and when she was cleaning her closet she noticed the dress hanging there and her NASA pin was still attached.
Rita told BuzzFeed: “A group of girls had written a letter requesting that I wear something sparkly for the event because they wanted to believe that scientists could be sparkly. They wanted to see a ‘sparkling geek.”
“I found the sparkliest dress I could, I wanted to show them I heard them.”
“I couldn’t believe this dress has been hanging here, and I thought about [that day] and how amazing it was [of the girls] to make the request,”
“Why should we have to chose between being a scientist and being sparkly? Let’s keep breaking that idea.”
Rita received an overwhelming response on her tweet and many people resonated with her tweet.
She said: “It’s making me emotional that so many people are responding to it,”
“It seems like at this moment there’s something boldly subversive about getting up there and boldly, un-apologetically wearing sequins because girls asked you to,”
“I hope what they’re responding to is the idea that women have a very important role to play and we have a lot of responsibility on us. Wearing sparkles does not in any way diminish the seriousness of what we’re doing.”
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