The Girls Who Chase Initiative: Empowering Girls and Women Through Storm Chasing

It’s well known that the field of storm chasing, like meteorology, is male-dominated. But is it, really? Women have been chasing and capturing wild and amazing weather content for as long as men – yet we rarely see them proportionally in media (news, reality television, and social). It turns out this imbalance has had a much grander impact on the world of weather than most realize.

Girls Who Chase launched in July 2021 as an Instagram page designed to showcase the talents of female storm chasers. Due to the extraordinary interest the initiative received almost immediately, it quickly grew into a multifaceted media platform providing interviews and storytelling in a variety of self-created media; education and training; and a supportive, safe community designed to encourage participation and belonging. The initiative’s current focus is defined by two pillars: (1) empowering and inspiring girls and women to identify stories of self-limitation and remove their own roadblocks to pursue their true passions, and (2) encouraging girls and women to participate in STEM activities using storm chasing as an engaging entrée.

Today, Girls Who Chase has amassed a treasure trove of anecdotal and qualitative data on shared experience from female and female-identified storm chasers in over 15 countries, as well as from the storm chasing community, weather and meteorology communities, the STEM community, and the media (news, reality television, and social). This information has helped tease out patterns in barriers to entry for women in storm chasing, as well as identify a pervasive and subtle cyclic pattern in culture and media that ultimately led to the marginalization of women in chasing, and more broadly, in the weather enterprise.

It is clear that the rise of Girls Who Chase has interrupted this pattern, and additionally brought a collective awareness to many of the gender disparities that cycle has wrought. Now, the initiative is sharing this information as a case study – to help us understand the cultural patterns we get stuck in, how we can interrupt them, and what it looks like when together, a weather community decides it’s time for something different.