It is ten years since UNESCO declared today, February 11th, as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Less well-known, I suspect, than International Women’s Day, it has a more specific focus. Sadly, in its ten years of existence, progress against its goals has not been particularly marked, despite the importance of women and girls entering the world of science to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, one could hazard a guess that in some places (notably Afghanistan) things will have gone backwards, with girls denied education of any sort at secondary level, never mind in the sciences.
The UNESCO call for action focusses on three areas, calling for urgent multistakeholder collaborative actions to: dismantle gender stereotypes and biases in science; open educational pathways for girls in science; and create empowering workplace environments. The UK could look at its own culture and consider how well it is doing across these objectives. Better than Afghanistan obviously, but we’ve a long way to go to eradicate gender differences in terms of pathways and stereotypes. In the run-up to last year’s Day, Teach First carried out a survey of children’s attitudes to science and maths (for children between the ages of 11 and 16). They found that more than half of girls (54.3%) don’t feel confident learning maths, compared to two-fifths (41.2%) of boys, with the gap even wider for science, with more than four in ten girls (43%) not confident, compared with a quarter of boys (26%). What is it in our society and our teaching that leads to this substantial difference, and why are teachers unable to overcome the issues?
Note, this is a problem of confidence not ability. When it comes to GCSEs, girls outperform boys, but the lack of confidence continues to manifest itself in that fewer girls than boys progress to A Levels in the STEM subjects, with particular shortfalls in the ‘hard’ sciences such as Physics and Computing, as well as Further Maths. Of course, these numbers then translate into lower numbers entering university to study those subjects as well as Engineering. And yet, report after report highlights how diversity in a company’s workforce leads to better outcomes, be it in a company’s profits or innovation.
By celebrating both girls and women in science, February 11th specifically highlights the pipeline. If girls get deterred from any interest they may have in science early on, they are unlikely to enter the STEM professions later. Schools and teachers have a key role to play here, in identifying what it is in their school ethos that may be holding girls back. The IOP’s (now quite old) data showing how single sex schools are more likely to see girls progress to A Level than coeducational establishments, must tell us something about the school environment in general. I’m not convinced that things have improved since that 2012 report.
A small-scale study from the USA highlighted that children (both boys and girls) as young as 6 or 7 already see boys as inherently ‘smarter’ than girls. This is something that our society should be capable of eradicating if it put its mind to it. The belief that you have to be especially clever in order to be able to do Physics (particularly if you are a girl) is, again, borne out by many studies. The ASPIRES2 cohort study, led by Louise Archer, surveyed many children between the ages of 14 and 19. It showed that girls who do physics are regarded as exceptional, possessing high levels of cultural, social and science capital. They are presumed not to be typically ‘girly’. Girls may not identify with this description, indeed they may not want to identify with it. Furthermore, Physics is represented – in textbooks and overall narrative – as a subject for men. A lack of explicit representation of women in physics can lead to the assumption that women are unable to work in physics, or are unsuited to it. Once again it is not necessarily ability that is in question here, so much as a feeling of belonging or wanting to belong to the exclusive sect that appears not to be for them. Similar attitudes can be seen in those whose cultural capital or socioeconomic background leads them to feel unwanted in the subject.
More needs to be done to analyse, not just what deters girls from entering Physics (and, by extension, Engineering and probably Computing), quite a lot is known about this. Now we also need to know what interventions would make a difference and, crucially, at what age. How is that girls imbibe the notion so early that they are less smart than boys? What would make a difference? Is it in how teachers interact in the classroom? Or is it in the messages they receive through the various media (social and otherwise) and their homes? Could teachers, if innocent of conveying the message themselves, do a better job of actively counteracting society’s messages throughout school years? Would more stories of modern women (and not just Marie Curie and, slightly more recently, Katherine Johnson) have a visible impact on the enthusiasm girls evince for the STEM subjects?
I don’t know the answers to questions like these but I think collectively we need to find them. I do worry, however, that a headteacher who is frequently lauded (at least by the last government) as leading such an outstanding school as Michaela, and yet who is unaware – or at least unconcerned – that her school has a below-average percentage of girls studying Physics at A Level, is the tip of the iceberg in the teaching profession. If diversity is only considered in terms of behaviour in the classroom in their training, how are teachers – particularly non-science-specialist teachers – to recognize and deal with the problem? And do they have the bandwidth to do something about this when their lives are so full and stressed already?
