A ‘voice in off’ explains that 75% of those enrolled in engineering are boys and that eight out of ten students of health sciences, as in Nursing, are girls. A person with operating room clothes appears from behind and with the head of a baby resting on his shoulder while hearing that 91% of births are attended by midwives. On the image of an astronaut, also from behind, it is heard that of the seven active professionals at ESA, six are men. The narrator and the screen coincide: «Turn it around». The astronaut turns around and it is a smiling Sara García, the first Spaniard selected to travel to space. The broken toilet and who holds the newborn is a man, Juanjo Juanas, one of the first Spaniards to study as a midwife, 42 years ago. “It’s time, turn it around,” encourages the ad.
It is the central ‘spot’ of the awareness campaign with which the Ministry of Universities wants to remove prejudices and stereotypes rooted in Spanish youth and adults for many decades and reverse the evident segregation by gender that exists in many of the higher education centers . Some figures of professional segregation that the minister considers “improper to the 21st century.”
Joan Subirats, after a study certifies the problem and the main causes of its existence, promised today to do everything possible to change it, including the creation of an inter-ministerial working group, with Education, Equality and Science, to agree on what measures can be put in place to try to ensure that no race has an imbalance of more than 40%-60%, either on the side of men or on the side of women.
Roles from childhood
The minister put on the table, for debate by educational authorities and campuses, two actions that he considers could help to break this undesired effect of titles with greater gender segregation, especially in the areas known as STEM, technological careers , mathematics and engineering, in many of whose faculties and schools the presence of women in Spain is little more than symbolic.
Subirats considers it interesting that the regional councils and universities, which are the ones with the competencies for this, could implement incentives, with reductions in enrollment fees, or even minimum annual quotas for access to the degree, to attract women to Computer Science studies, where they are only 14% of the students, or theoretical Physics, where they are close to 10%, or to bring men closer to university training in care or teaching areas, since they do not reach 30 % in the different degrees in health sciences –with 18%, for example, in Nursing–, with extremes in careers such as Early Childhood Education, where they are 8% of those enrolled.
The study of Universities indicates that the main responsible for segregation are the processes of socialization and cultural construction in childhood, in which stereotypes similar to those of half a century ago continue to be fixed on the smallest, with roles based on gender and professions and activities of boy or girl. These stereotypes and biases are repeated in school, institute and the social environment, without female scientists or technologists as references.
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