SURPRISE ! No change in the gender gap for science careers (2004-2014)

I received an email from my advisor today sharing a link and saying we had some sad statistics to cite in future papers.  The study was was done by the National Student Clearinghouse Research center and it is called: Science & Engineering Degree Attainment: 2004-2014

The tagline for the study was: "From 2004 to 2014, science and engineering degrees increased in prevalence for both genders. The trend was driven by growth in the so-called hard sciences."

However by looking at the results you can get to a really sad picture of what it means to be a woman in STEM careers.

Let´s look at the big picture first

Source: The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

This picture shows that the gender distribution remained the same from 2004-2014. Many people would look at this graph and say we have reached equality in higher ed. It´s not 50-50 but definetly one could not say women are unrepresented at the doctoral level.

However, as the study says the picture changes a lot when you look at the specific disciplines

Source: The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

There is a significant drop at the bachelor level in Computer Science, for example. Again remember this data comprises 10 years !! Either we have not accomplished anything for 10 years or we have made it worse !!

                                           Source: The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

This is exactly the kind of graph that people against doing something about the gender gap in STEM careers loves to cite. "Well women are not underrepresented in the social sciences nor biology. Is because women like animals and nurturing stuff." I have seen this argument cited on papers many many times. Specially on papers studying career interest at the middle school level. However as someone part of STEM desertion statistic I can say I am not doing research on learning sciences because I couldn´t help my biological predisposition to do nurturing stuff. I am doing this because I lived first hand the kind of obstacles women and girls live everyday when trying to pursue STEM careers of any type. I wanted to do something about it and here I am.

I am part of those numbers and I know is beyond women been more naturally nurturing. Is because the gender gap at elementary school just keeps getting bigger and bigger because at every step girls and women don't have enough support to keep going.  A simple but strong example is the #likeagirl ad in the Super Bowl.

This study shows us something beyond a gender gap. This is more than a sad/impressive statistic of how number are dropping or not even moving. Anybody looking at the numbers knows this means so much for multiple decades of research and intervention programs. But most importantly !! WE HAVE TO TRY DIFFERENT THINGS! WE HAVE TO START LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM! Because it exists! But whatever we have been doing is not working.

Inclusion in Science Education

It´s been a long time since I write a poset here. Moving to the United States and starting a Ph.D program kept me busy. Now with 2015 starting I am taking the opportunity to re-start writing and to give a little different focus on the blog.

This blog started to narrate my experiences as a middle school chemistry teacher in Mexico. The experience was wonderful and made me realize how much I wanted to learn about research in education and how to improve science education. I am currently enrolled in a Ph.D in Learning Sciences and Policy program a big change coming from the physical sciences and something that has made me rethinking my identity in a lot of ways (If you are interested in this road towards a researcher identity and what is like to move from the physical sciences to the social sciences look here. I am keeping a separate blog for this purpose because my mind still has trouble wrapping around my two identities). Currently my research project is focused on identifying the factors that make middle school children want or not a future career in science, this project is part of the National Activation Lab (Important to say any views presented her do not represent the ones of my employer, advisor, university, etc). This blog will still focus on ways to improve education in chemistry and how to avoid chemophobia however,  I will start blogging also about education in STEM in general.

This semester I am taking a class called "Design of Educational Systems" with the objective of learning how to design instruction for education purposes. In this class we are assigned to teams and that team to a real life client. My client (which will remain anonymous for this and future posts on the topic) is a teacher that wants us to design instruction for a high school biology classroom. the syllabus has a lot of things related to chemistry: energy, mass, DNA, cycles and photosynthesis. The interesting thing about this project is that this classroom has a significant number of special ed students (the two other members of the team are special ed researcher, meaning I am the "science ed expert" of the team). The topic of inclusion is very on vogue right now in the United States and there is a lot of research on its pros and cons (For a review see here), the topic is also very controversial. The review I cited was found the following things in the literature:

"(a) the impact of inclusion programs on the academic performance and social development of students with disabilities has been mixed; (b) the placement of students without disabilities in inclusion programs does not appear to interfere with their academic performance and has several social benefits for these students; and (c) teachers' responses to inclusion programs are complex, are shaped by multiple variables, and change over time." (Salend & Garrick 1999)

Though this review was written 15 years ago lots of the things mentioned are still relevant. Despite the large body of research on inclusion there is little related to special ed in science education. One of the reasons for this is that special education encompasses an umbrella of things that can go from autism to learning disabilities to blindness to ADHD. This makes research on the topic and instruction difficult because two different kids labeled as "special education" can have totally different needs in the classroom.

I decided to try to participate in the debate doing a series of posts on my experience developing this specific type of instruction. Because of IRB and ethics I can´t give really specific details about some things but I can definitely talk about my reflections and learning of the process. I hope with this any teacher that stumbles into my blog can read something that might help him support these kids in a better way. I also intend to help start a discussion among people who do research in science about a topic that is not really talked about. We usually talk about autism when complaining about antivaxers. And we talk about improving scientific literacy to avoid chemophobia in the general population. I think we can also talk about how these kids that have a totally different perception and experiences in this world learn and perceive science. I think we can learn from them better ways to become as scientists closer to society.

Thanks for reading and see you readers soon !