Conference Papers
Girls don’t have the “math sense”: How secondary school students make sense of STEM related subject choice
- Girls don’t have the “math sense”: How secondary school students make sense of STEM related subject choice
- International Conference on Gender, Language and Education (ICGLE) (2020: The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)
-
- Hong Kong
-
- 1997.7 onwards
-
- Secondary Education
- In the past two decades, despite their improved access to education, women remain underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). According to UNESCO (2017, pp. 18-20), between 2014 and 2016, the global average enrolment figures of female university students in the fields of “information and communication technologies” and “engineering, manufacturing and construction” constituted only 28% and 27% respectively. Similar situation can be found in Hong Kong. From 2011 to 2017, females have been the minorities in programmes of ‘sciences’ and ‘engineering and technology’, standing at around 35% to 39% and 29% to 33% respectively.Studies have identified various factors contributing to women’s under-representation in STEM. Barriers identified include the alignment of science culture and curriculum with masculinity (Archer, et al., 2016), the identity tensions for young girls when they do science (Faulkner, 2007; Gonsalves 2014), teachers’ bias (Carlone, 2003; Warrington and Younger, 2000), and lack of science capital (Francis, et al., 2017) This paper contributes to the current discussion by examining secondary school students’ narratives towards their STEM choice.We conducted eight focus group interviews (N=56), comprising female and male students who have chosen more or less STEM subjects in their Diploma of Secondary School Examination (DSE, which is a public examination leading to university admission). Our findings indicate that some prominent gendered beliefs prevail amongst Hong Kong students, including “boys are more sensible whereas girls are more sensitive”; “only boys are endowed with math sense – the natural ability to do math”; “girls only work hard but have no math sense”; and “girls that are good at math are exceptional or abnormal”. These gender stereotypical and male-dominated beliefs are particularly damaging to female students, as they undermine their self-efficacy and learner-identities. Copyright © 2020 International Conference on Gender, Language and Education.
- Paper presented at International Conference on Gender, Language and Education (ICGLE), The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
-
- English
- Conference Papers
- https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/7137ce45
- 2022-06-07
Recent Conference Papers
Enhancing students’ positive life values and well-beingConference Papers
Exploring the role of team-based e-assessment in teaching Chinese as a second language: A perspective of pedagogical design in an international primary school in Hong KongConference Papers
Effects of experience on pre-service kindergarten teachers' attitudes toward the implementation of inclusive education in the Hong Kong vocational education contextConference Papers
Understanding gifted students’ self-assessment of career adaptability in Hong Kong: A Rasch analysis of the psychometric properties of CAAS-SFConference Papers
香港中文准教師沉浸課程的跨學科學習Conference Papers
Helping teachers to teach with corpora: The Corpus-Aided Platform for Language Teachers (CAP)Conference Papers
Problematising the Global North/South binaries: A critical review of the sociological literature of education of ethnic minority students in Hong KongConference Papers
The efficacy of educational apps for teaching in the humanities: Adopting the PICRAT modelConference Papers