Engaging women into STEM in Latin America

Abstract

Significant progress has been made during the last decades to achieve gender equality, but there is still much work to do. In particular, the gender gap is pronounced in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields at all levels of education and labour market. In those areas, the women participation remains low, although there are differences from country to country. In the Latin American context, there is a need for carrying out studies to collect quality data about the actual situation of women in STEM. Although some available data show a high proportion of women in Latin American university education, they are a minority in STEM programs. Moreover, this problem is particularly severe in Latin America because of the biases or cultural norms that influence female behaviour. In this context, the W-STEM project seeks to improve strategies and mechanisms for attracting, accessing, and guiding women in Latin America in STEM higher education programs. This work aims to describe the main results to prepare a set of attraction campaigns in secondary schools in the Latin American countries involved in the project (Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico). In particular, a self-assessment tool about gender equality in higher education institutions in Latin America, an interview protocol for female role models, and a mobile application to show those role models.

Participation of Women in STEM Higher Education Programs in Latin America: The Issue of Inequality

“…This paper shows a partial result of the W-STEM project [7]. In particular, we focus on the design and accomplishment of the self-assessment survey on gender equality in STEM.…”

“…In 2019, a consortium of fifteen universities started the W-STEM project: Building the future of Latin America, engaging women into STEM, funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ program. The main objective of the project is to improve the strategies and mechanisms of attraction, access, and guidance of women in Latin American STEM higher education programs [7]. Female students in STEM programs usually have feelings of isolation and intimidation, as they are outnumbered by their male peers [5,8].…”

“…In our case, this step was assured firstly presenting the project goals in the various instances of decision including academic and administrative councils, and supporting offices such as Planning, Students Welfare, Bureau of Personnel and Recruitment departments.Assess available resources: one of the main resources for identifying indicators related to gender is the SAGA survey[10]. As stated in[7], the W-STEM project uses 25 indicators among the 45 indicators proposed by SAGA. These indicators are consistent with the aim of the project and congruous with the statistical information available in the participant universities.Target Population.…”

Computational thinking and robotics in education

“…In this paper Rojas-López and García-Peñalvo [43] [30][31][32] or RoboSTEAM Developing computational thinking is not easy due to the students require working the related skills from their early ages, something that use to be linked to STEM These disciplines that have shown to be necessary in order to have more efficient workers in our digital society integrating and fostering educational landscape is very complex summarize all this knowledge in a set of subjects, and it cannot be focused only on some subjects or courses.…”

“…This is a very exciting challenge with lots of possibilities regarding coding, robots, mobiles devices, Arduino-based application, game-based learning and so on. Thus, it is very important discuss the experiences that are being developed worldwide in specialized for a with researchers that are working on this field, such as for example TACCLE3 coding [27], VALS [28,29], W-STEM [30][31][32] or RoboSTEAM [33,34] European projects.…”