Stereotyping and bias towards female earth science students and faculty members in Africa

Abstract

To understand the preponderance of stereotyping of Earth Sciences as a male-oriented science in Africa, we perform a robust analysis of two electronic surveys. The current perception of female students' activities and performances was evaluated through a primary survey (N = 151; 28% female), which consisted of responses from academic professionals working in Universities and other Earth Science-related organizations. The second survey (N = 795; 38% female) investigated the ratio of male to female students currently enrolled in, or those that have graduated from Earth Science programs across Africa. Our approach for analyzing the collected data was based on descriptive statistics such as skewness, kurtosis, and Pearson correlation coefficients. Importantly, our data and analyses revealed under-representation of female student respondents, perhaps due to lower female students' enrolment among the sampled respondents. The responses to the main research questions are largely normally distributed and platykurtic. Thus, there is an overall lack of preference for female over male students across different ages, years of teaching, and cognate experience brackets in most countries represented. Many female academic professionals also slightly perceive male students are not more active than their female counterparts during laboratory and field activities. Majority of these female respondents think that geosciences are meant for female students also, but do not expressively consider it as a female profession. Respondents within the age bracket of 25–35 years and with cognate experience of >10 years do not consider male students to be better than their female counterparts. Significantly, our work shows that the gender of the respondents has no positive impact on their preference for male or female students albeit there were more male than female respondents.