Gender gap in science can be bridged in 15 minutes
November 25, 2010
Joseph Hall
HEALTH REPORTER
The perennial gender gap that has seen male students dominate university science and engineering classes can be substantially bridged with a 15-minute questionnaire, a study in one of the world’s leading science journals says.
Female students who filled out a short “values affirmation” exercise at the start of a physics semester gained a full letter grade on average and nearly pulled even with their male counterparts in the course, according to a paper released Wednesday by the journal Science.
“I would say that the results are remarkable and in many regards unbelievable,” says Noah Finkelstein, who teaches physics education research at the University of Colorado.
“It’s remarkable that with such a simple intervention that you’re able to find such significant impact.”
Finkelstein, a study co-author, says the average grade for female students who filled out the three-page document went from a traditional C to a B in an introductory physics course at the Boulder school.
The exercise, which was given twice in the first month of the course, asked students to look at a list of values and circle the ones they thought most important.
The questionnaire listed values such as being good at art, creativity, learning or gaining knowledge and belonging to social groups – but avoided any that directly dealt with math or science.
Of the original 439 students who filled out the questionnaire, about 75 per cent were men – a figure that reflects the population of many introductory physics courses.
But the affirmation exercise had little impact on the male students’ marks.
Study co-author Tiffany Ito says it is likely the male-dominated environment – freighted with its cultural stereotypes and norms — that the questionnaire helps female students overcome.
While the precise psychological mechanism is not known, the exercise likely works by helping to bolster the female students’ opinions of themselves in the context of the class, says Ito, a psychologist at the university.
“This opportunity to reflect on your core personal values helps you to kind of reestablish . . . your sense of self-worth,” she says.
And the more women endorse the stereotype that men are better at science, the more effective the questionnaire seems to be, Ito says.
Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers drew fire from many quarters in 2005 when he suggested women lagged behind men in science, technology, engineering and math — the so-called STEM professions — because of innate differences between the sexes.
In a speech that year, Summers, now head of the U.S. National Economic Council, said women had “different availability of aptitude at the high end,” in those subjects and professions.
But Finkelstein says that until recently there was little introspection among science educators about the obvious gap.
“In the traditional physics community we haven’t addressed it, we haven’t paid attention to the gender gap,” he said. “So one of the reasons the gender gap has existed is that we’ve been (internally) unaware of it.”
Finkelstein says the questionnaire does not provide a “silver bullet” and that much of the work in bringing true equality to the fields must be done in earlier schooling.
“The bulk (of the difference) is still accounted for by prior background and prior preparation,” he says.
But Finkelstein says that giving the questionnaire in high school or even during primary grades might well help steer girls toward the subjects with more confidence.
“It couldn’t hurt,” he says.
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