Confirming the legitimacy of female participation in science,technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM): evaluation of a UK STEM initiative for girls

This paper offers a study of a Saturday science-activity club for young secondary school aged girls, in Cardiff, UK. It provides a critical analysis of interactions between group participants and their mentors in building an equitable and experiential learning zone for the promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) as subject and occupational choices. This study explores how science outreach programmes for young women represent a form of gender re-education, reconfiguring and redefining gender identities in science. We consider how an informal, experiential learning programme scaffolds female learners in discovering the confidence to negotiate multiple iterations of STEM, and in developing an ability to celebrate gender difference and the multiple roles of women to science.     

Gender division in sociology degree programmes – causes and effects?

In spite of engagement and efforts to bring about gender equality in Swedish universities, gender division paradoxically appears in both old and new degree programs and academic disciplines. In recent years there has been a tendency for higher education students to enrol in degree programmes rather than in single subject courses. Due to the decreasing number of students taking subjects like sociology, Halmstad University College has constructed a degree programme, Sociologi och socialt utvecklingsarbete [Sociology and social development], focused on community development and social action; sociology is the main specific subject here. In the autumn of 2007, 95% of the 61 students were female, compared to the 75% of female students in sociology degree courses that Sweden has had in the past seven years. The problem of skewed gender representation in sociology is discussed here, and its consequences for educational practices in sociology as well as for the contents and status of the discipline in the future.     

Fight the power: situated learning and conscientisation in a gendered community of practice

In this paper, I employ situated learning theory to explore gendered processes of marginalisation and conscientisation in a social movement organisation. Using a student activist organisation as a case study, I explain women's awareness of and resistance to masculine performances of leadership and decision-making through the concept of gendered communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation. I explore how gender inequality is performed in a community of practice, and how it both impedes and facilitates learning and resistance through legitimate peripheral participation. I attempt to bridge situated learning and conscientisation to better theorise the learning and resistance that occur when people are marginalised within communities of practice.     

‘Even with higher education you remain a woman’: a gender perspective on higher education and social change in the Toliara region of Madagascar

This article investigates some issues related to gender and education based on a qualitative, empirical study of women in higher education in the Toliara region of Madagascar. The focus is on how women’s participation in higher education has created changes in gender relations, and how these women have succeeded in achieving higher education. In spite of the interviewed women’s more influential social position and individual freedom, we found that the traditional gender expectations and economic expectations from the extended family are still present. Indeed, it appears that with rising social position and individual freedom, the pressure and demands from their extended families increase.     

Teachers' care in higher education: contesting gendered constructions

There is little research on care in higher education, and yet for many of those who teach in higher education institutions, care is an important part of their work. Care in the compulsory education sector has traditionally been linked to the feminine, and this paper considers whether this is also the case in higher education. It investigates how care is conceptualised and gendered in the literature and in narratives of teaching staff from New Zealand universities. It finds that there is much more to care than traditional models offer, and shows how this complexity of care challenges gendered stereotypes. It concludes that a broader understanding of care can help break the link to the feminine and acknowledge the value of care in higher education and beyond.     

Examining students’ perspectives on gender bias in their work-integrated learning placements

ABSTRACT

Work-integrated learning (WIL) affords students opportunities to apply skills and knowledge to practical work placements. Students potentially learn professional behaviours appropriate to their chosen industry sector. However, students may also face challenges they may not be prepared to navigate. One of these is gender bias due to assumptions about women and work, particularly within STEM sectors. This article presents findings from a pilot study that explores WIL students’ perspectives on gender bias related to experiences at their internship placements or other jobs. The findings suggest that the potential lack of gender neutrality within organizations such as WIL placements, is nuanced through an underlying bias around thinking about gender, women and work, and demonstrated through institutional structures such as branded recruitment campaigns or the individual micro aggressions of co-workers and supervisors. Further research needs to focus on the impact of gender bias on students’ sense of value within different organizations, and the strategies they employ to navigate bias. In the short-term, all students need tools to help them understand how gender is constructed within organizational processes and how to develop strategies to help them confront gender bias within the organizations in which they work.     

Creating spaces in a male domain: Sister Principals in Catholic schools, 1850–1974

This paper builds on recent scholarship on the gendered nature of educational work to argue that while conceptualisations of the principalship are underpinned by scholarship and policy assumptions that construct the work of the principal as a male domain, women have responded to opportunities presented by changing historical, political and social contexts, creating professional spaces for themselves as principals in primary and secondary schools within both state and Catholic school systems. It details how in the years prior to 1975, a time when the majority of state primary and secondary schools were led by men, the principalship of New Zealand Catholic schools was a largely female endeavour. The experience of Catholic Sister Principals was framed by the fact that they were women leading schools in a world dominated by men. Implicit in this arrangement were the ecclesiastical authority structures and their subjection to the convent hierarchy. Nevertheless, Sister Principals learned a range of strategies that enabled them to negotiate with Church and religious authorities and to undertake the diverse tasks associated with the leadership of Catholic schools.     

《守望灯塔》的性别化叙事策略简

从性别叙事学角度分析英国当代女作家詹妮特·温特森的小说《守望灯塔》的叙事策略。《守望灯塔》采用框式叙述结构讲述了女孩银儿和灯塔建造者巴比·达克两个不同故事。温特森以女性视角叙述银儿自身的故事,以男性宏大视角和女性私密视角交替讲述达克的故事,从而形成两个性别不同的叙述声音,最终女性叙述声音超越了男性叙述声音,实现了性别化的叙事策略。     

‘Proper masculinities’ and the fear of feminisation in modern Cyprus: university students talk about homosexuality and gendered subjectivities

The present article attempts to pay attention to the ways in which a group of young Cypriot students engage in the construction of conventional notions of masculinities through the negation and the fear of homosexual desire. Drawing on interviews with 12 male and female university students, I argue that many young men go through complicated processes of anxiety and fear in order to achieve a masculine heterosexual career and to prove that they are ‘real men’. In that way the male participants I interviewed expressed the idea that in the cultural space of Cyprus masculine subject positions are the most powerful ones. The participants commented on the unthinkable sexual choice of loving someone from the same sex and concluded that choosing to stay in Cyprus and live a gay life would be very painful if not unthinkable. The article concludes that gender anxiety in Cyprus is expressed through the abjection of homosexuality.