A glance at the headlines last week could certainly freak a girl out: “Spokane student killed in Montana.” “Reward offered in search for robber.” “Woman escapes attempted rape.”

The grim criminal investigations plodded on in our region, with one happy twist. On Friday evening, high school science teacher Kimb Wilson planned to entice preteen girls into her favorite career field with a slumber party featuring the compelling narratives and the cool technology of forensic science.

The evening was called “Crime Scene Investigation,” and it was scheduled at Hillyard Baptist Church. Its sponsors were the Northeast Youth Center and Spokane Parks & Rec.

As the slumber party approached, Wilson prepared to lead a couple of dozen girls through the techniques of DNA extractions and blood analysis. She arranged for a mock intruder to stage a break-in late in the evening. Then the girls would be asked to solve the crime by analyzing fingerprints, footprints and hair samples. It was unclear whether anyone would get any sleep that night.

But Wilson hoped to leave these girls so wide-eyed about science that they would follow their imaginations right into its classrooms and its careers. The evening was designed not for contemplating a woman’s traditional role as the passive victim in a crime scene, but her potential for action, her capacity to be the keen-eyed agent who cracks the case.

Girls who find science fascinating – whether by taking their first glimpse of the stars through a telescope, by mixing up a vial of disappearing ink or by exploring the world of arachnids – can follow their curiosity into some of the country’s best-paying jobs.

There’s no doubt that education efforts aimed at girls and women have already been effective. More women go to college now than men. And according to the American Association of University Women, women now earn more than 60 percent of the undergraduate biology degrees in the U.S.

But women’s salaries continue to lag behind those of men – 77 cents on the dollar in 2005 – and their employment levels in the relatively high-paying fields of medicine and engineering still fall behind.

Fortunately, a new crop of women science teachers are joining the effort.

Wilson, a first-year 10th-grade science teacher at Lewis and Clark High School, became intrigued by astronomy when she visited a planetarium in grade school. Her parents bought her a small telescope. Later she began collecting bugs, and, as she grew up, she came to embrace her inner science geek.

Now Wilson tells girls the stories of the “dark women” of science. She introduces them to chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was the first scientist to recognize the helix shape of DNA. Her work was passed along to male scientists, however, who ultimately won the Nobel Prize for that discovery.

Wilson’s enthusiasm centers around a field that today can truly change the lives of women. “It opens up so many doors in life,” she says. “It cures diseases. It puts rockets into space.”

It’s long past time for our culture to eliminate outdated notions about women and science. Elsewhere in the world, parents and teachers expect young women to study biology, chemistry and physics just as diligently as young men do. And in our state, there’s considerable pressure to raise high school graduation requirements for all students. Bill Gates now urges Washington to increase its two years of required science to four.

It will take measures like these to help break down the remaining barriers between women and careers in science.

For girls of my generation, our primary introduction to forensic science lay in the pages of a Nancy Drew novel. If Nancy had been plotting a career in a white lab coat and urging her friends to take up DNA analysis, the employment statistics for baby boomer women in the sciences might look very different today. Perhaps the publishers of “The Secret of the Old Clock” lacked a market for a story called “CSI: Hillyard.”

But for girls of this next generation, it’s a headline with the power to inspire a career.