Bamberger Feminine role model JOST 2014 (original) (raw)
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This study examines the effect of a program that aimed to encourage girls to choose a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career in Israel. The program involved school visits to a high-tech company and meeting with role model female scientists. Sixty 9 th grade female students from a Jewish modern-orthodox single-sex secondary school in the same city as the company participated in the study. The control group contained 30 girls from the same classes who did not participate in the program. Data was collected through pre-post questionnaires, observations, and focus group interviews. It was analyzed for three main themes: perceptions of scientists and engineers, capability of dealing with STEM, and future career choice. Findings indicated respect toward the women scientists as being smart and creative, but significant negative change on the perceptions of women scientists/engineers, the capability of dealing with STEM, and the STEM career choices. Possible causes for these results are discussed, as well as implications for education.
Encouraging Girls into Science and Technology with Feminine Role Model: Does This Work?
Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2014
This study examines the effect of a program that aimed to encourage girls to choose a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career in Israel. The program involved school visits to a high-tech company and meeting with role model female scientists. Sixty 9 th grade female students from a Jewish modern-orthodox single-sex secondary school in the same city as the company participated in the study. The control group contained 30 girls from the same classes who did not participate in the program. Data was collected through pre-post questionnaires, observations, and focus group interviews. It was analyzed for three main themes: perceptions of scientists and engineers, capability of dealing with STEM, and future career choice. Findings indicated respect toward the women scientists as being smart and creative, but significant negative change on the perceptions of women scientists/engineers, the capability of dealing with STEM, and the STEM career choices. Possible causes for these results are discussed, as well as implications for education.
Girls and Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2014
Scientific advances fuel American economic competitiveness, quality of life, and national security. Much of the future job growth is projected in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). However, the supply of domestic students who pursue STEM careers remains small relative to the demand. On the supply side, girls and women represent untapped human capital that, if leveraged, could enhance the STEM workforce, given that they comprise 50% of the American population and more than 50% of the college-bound population. Yet the scarcity of women in STEM careers remains stark. What drives these gender disparities in STEM? And what are the solutions? Research points to different answers depending on the stage of human development. Distinct obstacles occur during three developmental periods: (a) childhood and adolescence, (b) emerging adulthood, and (c) young-to-middle adulthood. This article describes how specific learning environments, peer relations, and family characteri...
Women in STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. A View from Inside
The number of Turkish universities strongly increased from 1999 to present and the total number of students in technical sciences grew accordingly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are greater proportions of men than women involved in engineering and technical programs, although it is a documented fact that women in STEM jobs earn significantly more than those in non-STEM occupations and experience a smaller wage gap relative to men. But STEM is not a compact or amorphous “block”, large differences existing between its components. For example, the discrepancy between the proportion of women to men in science faculties and that in the engineering faculties shows that the trend is not to discriminate against women in all domains relating to exact sciences, but especially in those that are more “hands-on”. Engineering is thought to be a domain where “male” qualities, such as physical strength and endurance to effort and severe weather are highly important, giving rise to the stereotype of the strong engineer working in adverse conditions, which is probably one of the reasons why girls are less likely to be interested in pursuing this career. In an attempt to understand the motivation for choosing a career path, issues such as early encounters with technology, fair evaluation systems, non-gender biased education and an experimental teaching style will be addressed, together with issues related to barriers like early gender biased education, a theoretical teaching style, gender biased teachers and attitudes, difficulty in conciliating between careers and families and between professional obligations and personal life
Two important gender issues in science, technology and mathematics (STM) education are issues of participation and retention of girls/early-career women scientists in science and science-based careers. Studies show that women are under-represented in all occupations dealing with STEM all over the world. This study therefore aims at finding out the early career women scientists' perception of the factors affecting girls/women participation in Science and Technology as well as determine the strategies they think could be adopted to increase their participation and retention in those areas. Two research questions guided the conduct of the study. A sample of 220 early-career female scientists from four universities in the South East Nigeria participated in the survey. A 17-item questionnaire was used to collect data from the respondents. The data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation. Prominent among the factors affecting female participation and retention in science-based careers are perceived difficult nature of science and technology courses and lack of interest in science and technology careers. The strategies to improve the situation include among others that successful women in the field should be made feasible to the young ones and interact with them, female scientist students should be exposed to the benefits of science careers early enough, teachers should avoid criticisms/comments that could deter girls. The study concludes that some of the challenges could be eliminated if the successful female scientists and technologists could serve as role models to the young ones by making themselves feasible to them and interact with them.
Supporting Career Choices for Women in the Sciences and Engineering
Academic Journal of Engineering Studies, 2020
The purpose of this article is to review of current literature on women’s career growth in the sciences and engineering fields. It became evident quickly that sufficient evidence exists documenting the gender disparities in the Sciences, Engineering, Technologies, and Mathematics (STEM). Essential at this time is the generation of remedies to encourage and promote women as they pursue careers in the hard sciences and engineering fields. The economies of Canada and the US urgently need competent scientists and engineers across domains of business, higher education, and for innovation in the creation of new technologies. The article explains how stereotype threats and biases remain prevalent barriers to both men and women in the sciences and engineering. The author proposes adoption of the growth mindset, the reinforcement of leader identify for engineers, and she recommends urgency on mentoring and coaching approaches to strengthen retention of women in the fulfillment of careers in science and engineering.
2018
n 2005, Blickenstaff wrote that woman were under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in both education and careers in most industrialised countries around the world. This under-representation is not something new, it was identified as problematic as early as the 1980s (Kelly et al.,1981; Smail et al., 1982). While encouraging girls to study and pursue careers in the technology sector continues to be problematic even today (Bauer, 2017). After introducing the topic, the paper begins with a brief discussion of some of the factors that researchers have believed influenced this under-representation. Several ways forward to improve the state of affairs from the literature are then discussed, before turning to concentrate specifically on role-models and the part that they can play in changing the situation. The next section focuses on the author’s personal experiences of being a role- model in a male-dominated workplace in the mid-1960s when she started ...
Sustainability
From an early age, girls disregard studies related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM), and this means that a gender gap begins during secondary education and continues to increase over time. Multiple causes have been identified for this phenomenon in the literature, and numerous initiatives are being carried out to reverse this situation. In this paper, we analyze the impact that a group mentoring initiative led by a female STEM role model had on the young people who participated and whether the impact was different based on their sex. We analyzed how these mentoring sessions affected their attitudes towards technology, mathematical self-efficacy, gender stereotypes, science and technology references, and career vocations. To this end, 303 students between the ages of 10 and 12 years old from 10 schools in Spain participated in the six sessions comprising the program and completed a series of questionnaires before and after participating. The results show tha...
Women and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)
The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy, 2017
Researchers from economics, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines have studied the persistent underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This chapter summarizes this research. It argues that women’s underrepresentation is concentrated in the math-intensive science fields of geosciences, engineering, economics, math/computer science, and physical science. Its analysis concentrates on the environmental factors that influence ability, preferences, and the rewards for those choices. The chapter examines how gendered stereotypes, culture, role models, competition, risk aversion, and interests contribute to the gender STEM gap, starting in childhood, solidifying by middle school, and affecting women and men as they progress through school and higher education and into the labor market. The results are consistent with preferences and psychological explanations for the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive STEM fields.
Young women in science and technology: the importance of choice
Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2013, 2:5
Despite significant improvements in the last couple of years, women are still under-represented in science and technology, both in the academic and private sector. This is due to a variety of reasons, mostly related to the role allocated to women in modern society as well as pre-existing prejudices that form glass ceilings while encouraging male presence in the workplace. It is also however, a result of information or lack of, which places young women in difficult position of making a career choice, with little knowledge of available possibilities. What seems to be missing are good role models that could act as inspiration and source of information and guidance, and offer a glimpse into the reality of being a female employed in the field of science and/or technology. Parents, teachers, and career guidance counselors all have a significant role in assisting or hindering the way young women chose their career paths and that choice begins early on from school, all the way through to higher education. Choice, essentially, and factors that determine it as well - as ways of encouraging female participation in science and technology - are the focus of the present article, which is based on results from the European project Information for a choice: empowering young women through learning for scientific and technological career paths, realized under the 6th Framework Program. As this article will show, the promotion through the usage of new technologies, of role models, is crucial in breaking the existing stereotype of women in science, engineering and technology. Science is often rejected as a career choice due to limited information available and positive role models to encourage young girls in participating. Career orientation offered at school through the usage of new technologies is an important step in that direction; however, particularly in countries where the family unit is especially influential in career decisions, parents must be brought in and educated on the possibilities available. Mass media also play an important role in introducing and sustaining stereotypical images of women in particular professional roles, thus, any outreach solutions need to include them.