Gender Stereotypes in Science Education Resources: A Visual Content Analysis

Abstract

More men are studying and working in science fields than women. This could be an effect of the prevalence of gender stereotypes (e.g., science is for men, not for women). Aside from the media and people’s social lives, such stereotypes can also occur in education. Ways in which stereotypes are visible in education include the use of gender-biased visuals, language, teaching methods, and teachers’ attitudes. The goal of this study was to determine whether science education resources for primary school contained gender-biased visuals. Specifically, the total number of men and women depicted, and the profession and activity of each person in the visuals were noted. The analysis showed that there were more men than women depicted with a science profession and that more women than men were depicted as teachers. This study shows that there is a stereotypical representation of men and women in online science education resources, highlighting the changes needed to create a balanced representation of men and women. Even if the stereotypical representation of men and women in science is a true reflection of the gender distribution in science, we should aim for a more balanced representation. Such a balance is an essential first step towards showing children that both men and women can do science, which will contribute to more gender-balanced science and technology fields.

Diversity in geoscience: Participation, behaviour, and the division of scientific labour at a Canadian geoscience conference

“…Well-known issues such as familial obligation and childbirth have been identified as constraints on women's participation in science, but increasingly research is revealing the subtle and invisible ways in which scientific cultures privilege certain perspectives, bodies, and backgrounds and devalue others (Jarreau 2016;Skibba 2016;Cheryan et al 2017;Nelson 2017;Rosen 2017). Studies have shown, for example, that even with identical resumes men are more positively evaluated as scientists relative to women by job search committees (Moss-Racusin et al 2012), that women with equivalent mathematical abilities to men nonetheless feel less confident in their own abilities (Ellis et al 2016), that women are less likely to receive strong reference letters from supervisors (Dutt et al 2016), and that common representations of science to children prominently portray men as scientists whilst women occupy other roles (Kerkhoven et al 2016). In geoscience, researchers have explored how fieldwork has been framed by heroic narratives emphasizing danger, strength, and masculine prowess, which has the effect of making women and others feel lacking or not welcome (Bracken and Mawdsley 2004;Carey et al 2016).…”

Using automatic image processing to analyze visual artifacts created by students in scientific argumentation

“…Differences were measured between the locations and sizes of the segmented regions. Local Consistency Error (LCE) (Kerkhoven et al ., ) was used to quantify the degree to which image segmentations were consistent with the ground truth. LCE can be represented as: …”

“…Even though scientific argumentation is conducted via written and spoken language, visual representations can improve the clarity and communicability of evidence‐based arguments (Spiegelhalter, Pearson, & Short, ). However, the role of visual representations in scientific argumentation remains poorly understood (Kerkhoven, Russo, Land‐Zandstra, Saxena & Rodenburg, ), mainly because most research has examined students' conceptual understandings of images instead of their use of images as tools in epistemic practices like scientific argumentation (Evagorou & Erduran, ). Moreover, most studies that have investigated the use of images in science learning have manually and qualitatively characterized small samples of images (eg, Spiegelhalter, Pearson, & Short, ).…”

Gender Construction in Experiment-Based Biology Lessons

“…Several gender-biased factors were identified in classes, which may facilitate stereotype formation [33]. These factors include the teaching and assessment methods a teacher chooses, which meet more or less the preferences of a certain sex category [34].…”

“…These factors include the teaching and assessment methods a teacher chooses, which meet more or less the preferences of a certain sex category [34]. In addition, the teachers' attitude to science and their function as a role model can be gender-biased, and the same applies for the selected contexts of a teaching content (e.g., technical vs. health-oriented contexts [35]), and also for the type of language and visuals (e.g., portraying mainly male scientists [36]) being used [33]. Teachers' gender-biased behaviors, however, can also be caused by the students themselves who trigger certain teacher reactions by their behavior.…”