Advice from a STEM Ambassador on gender

In this video interview, Alice Gray, a STEM Ambassador in Wales, talks about her approach to working with young people and her awareness of gender bias.

Alice featured recently on regional news talking about young people, gender and STEM subjects. You can find out more about her volunteering and watch her video clip on the Fixers website:

• Girls for Science

Summary

• Take time to reflect on your own biases.
• Balance interactions and contributions between boys and girls.
• Ownership of voice and confidence are important to develop in young people, particularly with girls.

Reflect

In this task, we’d like you to consider the ideas presented by Alice and the research from the previous step. Many of you will have delivered presentations or talked about your work with others. Using the questions below, identify what approaches you already use and where might you improve:

• Do you use gender neutral illustrations and examples?
• Do you use language without jargon?
• Do you use analogies with broad appeal, such as music or health, as opposed to football and cars?
• Do you provide context by linking topics and highlighting applications and social relevance?
• Do you draw attention to female role models?
• Do you monitor the proportion of time you interact with boys in comparison with the time you spent interacting with girls?

The questions above are also available as a checklist [Word docx]. A PDF is available below.