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Women in Science

10/28/2015

4 Comments

 
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According to the New York Times 58% of all bachelor's, master's, and doctorates degrees in biology are awarded to women (which conveniently matches up with the infographic above). Now this is an impressive stat but when you look deeper it reveals a sad truth. Besides futures in medicine, biology is the least paid avenue of the core sciences.
Lets look further at the picture above. In today's economy the higher paid jobs are more on the left side with engineering and the math heavy sciences. Those are the sciences where woman are vastly underrepresented. ​
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As teachers, what can we do to encourage our female students to explore the more math based sciences?  According to Dr. Huebner in a paper written for the ASCD, teachers need to implement teaching strategies that promote a high-mastery classroom with specific teacher feedback. This along with creating an open environment for all students to not become discouraged from the math intensive sciences can start to even out the gender gap that we see above.

Sources:​http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/where-the-women-are-biology.html?_r=0

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept09/vol67/num01/Encouraging-Girls-to-Pursue-Math-and-Science.aspx

4 Comments
Nikita
11/1/2015 10:27:01 am

I enjoyed that you started out with the very informative info-graphic. I actually never knew that even though women were under represented in science, they were still more common in subjects. Even with that the gaps are still not as wide as in the other subjects. I would have liked to see you dive deeper into what could be done to encourage female students to pursue STEM. How would you personally encourage your future students to pursue STEM?

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Nick Robinson
11/1/2015 08:56:38 pm

It's so interesting to see the significant disparities in gender ratios among STEM fields. As a male interested in science, do you have any insight into why females are driven towards biological science and away from engineering and physical science?

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Mary Beth
11/2/2015 09:48:53 am

I like how you were able to differentiate out which jobs were actually the higher paying jobs from the infographic. You stated the Dr. Huebner thinks we should move our classrooms to a more "mastery" style system, but how can we as future teachers help make those changed for our classroom in a world that is so focused on grades and numbers?

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drann
11/5/2015 06:45:08 am

Interesting infographic and one that is true! There is a disparity. I also love the photo of the girl standing in front of a calculus problem. Perfect example of something that could be posted in the classroom and used as a writing prompt at the beginning of class......

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