Gender disparity in science
Women are underrepresented in all occupations dealing with science, mathematics or engineering and it is an open question whether this situation is desirable or not.
We still have gender-specific and subsequently a gender-hierarchic division of the labour-market. The woman maintains the household and cares for children and family, the man earns the money in his job in the cruel world. This pattern has not changed very much with the growth of employment of women. As a consequence, nothing is changing in the gender-specific partitioning of the labour-market, implying worse earnings and career opportunities for women and stabilising the lower prestige of the profession chosen by them.
In school the beginning of the state is that girls show much less interest in science, particularly in physics and chemistry, than boys, and the more they grow up the more their interest in science decreases. As a consequence very few girls choose advanced courses in science and technology. This means that the majority of women do not participate in technological and scientific culture. Hence they are often pushed to deal with scientific and technology driven environment in a more magic and mystical manner rather than with rational understanding. They miss the scientific literacy which allows them to introduce their interests and points of view in the democratic process of decision making on the future trends of technological development. We can not afford to exclude half of the people from the science culture and even more than half because there are also many boys who do not reach through science instruction. And one has to agree to the feminist slogan: “wasting women power is really foolish”.
Here is a list of gender specific beliefs held by science teachers as well as gender-specific practices shown by them:
• Boys receive more attention by female and male teachers during teaching and learning processes in science classrooms.
• Boys are addressed and called by name more often than the girls.
• Boys receive more good and more bad feedback.
• Boys receive more eye contact, closer interaction, more counter-questions.
• Boys have to wait less longer to be called when they raise hands.
• Even if the teacher has the impression that they pay more attention to the girls than to the boys, empirical evidence showed the contrary. The boys are also found protesting against the girls to be favoured.
• Confidence in their own performance, intellectual curiosity, initiative and self reliance are behaviours that the teachers do not promote when dealing with girls in science classes.
• There is little room in lessons for the contributions and ideas of girls.
• Teachers expect that self-disciplined and professional performance from the girls result from their hard working and efforts and not from their abilities
“Science is still made by men for men, a male phenomenon — and those women who are present in this field are allowed just to join in — anything else is not left for them in research or teaching science for the time being.” (Hickel 1993). That means women have to adapt themselves to the norms valid in science – or they have to get out.
Summarising you can say it is crucial to avoid a male working and class atmosphere and rather to foster a democratic way of behaviour giving room for mutual acceptance, emotional human relations and multiple approaches for science.
On the other hand, we, as science teachers, teacher educators and researchers, should as a matter of routine look at the differences between girls and boys in our classroom, which does not happen normally. Supposedly you will find no differences in ability but probably in the way girls and boys deal with the subjects of science. I question if no differences are to be found in the students’ alternative framework when they are related to boys and girls. So it should be introduced in our research field to look at gender as a category to be taken in consideration in our education.