The largest official report carried out to date on the gender gap in the choice of studies reflects that the gap does not tend to close, but has increased in recent decades and continues to open year after year in disciplines such as Mathematics, Computer Science and good part of engineering and technological degrees, where the percentage of men is increasing. “After so many years of public equality policies, changes in educational models and with a much more sensitized society than in the past, it is alarming to see that not only has no improvement been made, but that in nuclear areas for the progress of society there is a considerable setback”, points out Montserrat Grañeras, one of the authors of the report.
In the 2000-2001 academic year, the percentage of female students in the higher degrees of Computer Science Vocational Training was close to 27% and in 2019-2020 (the last year available) it stood at 10%. In 1985, 30% of the students of the computer science degree were women, and now it is 12%. In the Mathematics career they have gone from being just over half to representing 36%. The weight of women has fallen in university studies in Physics, Statistics, Telecommunications and Aeronautics in the last two decades. And although in some technological Vocational Training degrees the percentage has risen, in four of them it remains below or well below 10%. The data is contained in the study entitled X-ray of the gender gap in STEAM training (acronym in English for science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which the Ministry of Education presents this Friday coinciding with the International day of women and girls in science.
Along with the bad news, Grañeras, head of the Equality Unit of the Ministry of Education, finds signs in the data that make him think that it is possible to change the vision that female students have about studies that provide job opportunities and salaries for above average. Women are not only a clear majority in degrees related to Health and care, but also in others that, being obviously technological, incorporate the prefix bio (life), such as the Biotechnology degree, where they represent 62%. As pointed out by a testimony collected by Steven Pinker in his work the blank slate, women seem, on average, more interested in studying questions related to living things than to the inner workings of, say, an appliance. For this reason, says Grañeras, “one of the levers to change the story” around these studies that reaches girls and young women is to convey to them “that technology is related to caring for people, the planet and sustainability”.
Strengthening this message to reduce “gender prejudice” and the “differentiated socialization” of boys and girls is one of the objectives of the materials that the ministry is creating within the framework of the so-called STEAM Alliance, promoted a year ago by Educación ya the one that ensures that a hundred companies and entities have joined, and also appears in the new regulations that will regulate teaching (curricula).
The document concludes that girls begin to move away from these disciplines in primary education, and that is when action must begin. Based on the TIMSS international report, prepared by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, the study shows that in fourth grade (9 and 10 years old) 36.7% of Spanish girls say they do not feel confident about mathematics, compared to 23.5% of boys. At the other extreme, 21.3% of girls feel very safe with discipline, and the percentage increases to 32.5% in the case of boys. The document also shows that in both the TIMSS exams and those of the PISA report (another international test that is carried out in high school), female students obtain significantly worse results in mathematics, something that does not happen in science, where they are similar, and that invest in the case of reading.
majority of women
Despite the fact that in the general picture their presence is low, women are the majority in some areas of STEAM degrees. The main one is Health, where they represent 78% in intermediate level vocational training cycles and 76% in higher level cycles. They account for 69% of the students in Medicine, 82% in Nursing and 75% in Biomedicine. They are also the majority, by a bit, in Chemistry (in Vocational Training and University), and in the middle cycle (although not in the higher one) of FP of Food Industries.
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