Abstract
From an early age, girls disregard studies related to science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM), and this means that a gender gap begins during secondary education and continues to increase over time. Multiple causes have been identified for this phenomenon in the literature, and numerous initiatives are being carried out to reverse this situation. In this paper, we analyze the impact that a group mentoring initiative led by a female STEM role model had on the young people who participated and whether the impact was different based on their sex. We analyzed how these mentoring sessions affected their attitudes towards technology, mathematical self-efficacy, gender stereotypes, science and technology references, and career vocations. To this end, 303 students between the ages of 10 and 12 years old from 10 schools in Spain participated in the six sessions comprising the program and completed a series of questionnaires before and after participating. The results show that the program had an impact on the students’ attitudes towards technology, increased the number of female STEM references they knew, and improved their opinions of vocations and professions related to science and technology. The impact was greater among girls, although in aspects such as attitudes towards technology, the female participants still demonstrated lower values than boys. The program did not improve the stereotypes that the young participants had about mathematical self-efficacy, which was also always lower among girls. We conclude that the lack of STEM vocations among girls is rooted in multiple social, educational, and personal aspects that need to be addressed from a very early age and that should involve multiple agents.
Highlights
Accepted: 24 January 2022Numerous studies support the existence of a gender gap in STEM disciplines internationally
In accordance with the five key aspects that were previously identified as causes of girls having a low interest in STEM areas and the objectives defined in Inspira STEAM, we proposed a study to analyze the impact of a group mentoring program in which a STEM
To determine the existence of different mathematical self-efficacy values between the students who participated in Inspira STEAM and those who did not, we analyzed the difference of means in paired samples between the control group and the experimental group and did not find any significant differences
Summary
Accepted: 24 January 2022Numerous studies support the existence of a gender gap in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines internationally. Despite having ability in these areas and showing no differences compared to boys in subjects such as mathematics [1], choose science and technology-related studies to a lesser extent than their male peers do. This leads to a loss of STEM skills in young women between secondary and tertiary education [2]. In terms of interest in science and technology, studies in the UK show that most children up to the age of 16 like technology but do not consider the professions of scientist or engineer to be desirable careers [4] This difference is first found in primary school and becomes more pronounced in secondary school. On the other hand, being technology users seems to be unrelated to Published: 26 January 2022
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