ABSTRACT
The persistent under-representation of girls/women in the physical sciences and engineering post-16 remains an intractable problem that continues to perplex policy-makers and educationalists alike. Indeed, decades of investment and interventions aimed at encouraging more girls and women to continue with science seem to have had little impact on gendered patterns of STEM participation (Phipps, 2008). While, in overall terms, boys’ rates of participation in the different sciences tend not to be regarded as particularly problematic, closer inspection suggests that there are noticeable patterns in terms of which boys tend to participate – namely, mostly White and South Asian middle-class boys (see Archer et al., 2014a). In this chapter we examine our data through the lens of gender to focus on these questions: why do so many girls come to see science as ‘not for me’? What role does femininity play in this? And how do those girls who maintain science aspirations manage to do so?1
