Question: Do you think there are not enough girls involved in science and if so how do you think we can get more girls involved?

Kate Dobson answered on 14 Nov 2014:

It depends on your subject as to how many girls there are in science, but there is NO reason why there shouldn’t be equal numbers of boys and girls. I went to an all girls school and there were almost as many people doing STEM (science technology engineering and maths) subjects at A level as there were doing Music or English or Languages, but I know that is usual.

I did geology and physics at university and in my geology class it was almost 50:50, and in some classes I’ve taught since then the girls out number the boys. However in my physics class the ratio was more like 1:10, and in my last job I was the only girl in a group of 30 people.

I don’t know why more girls don’t do subjects like Physics, Engineering and Materials, or why they seem to prefer biological and medical sciences (where significantly outnumber the boys). Maybe we still somehow have some kind of hangover from previous generations when the expectations were that men were engineers and builders and the women were nurses and secretaries…. I don’t know. One graph I’ve seen recently says that only 9% of people working in non-medical STEM subject careers are women. What do you think the reason is?

I think one way to get more peoples (including girls) into the STEM subjects is to make everyone more aware of the variety of really interesting jobs that you can have in science. All of us in this zone work at University, which a lot of people will say isn’t the “real world”… but the students I have taught, work for mining companies, and oil companies, and in environmental protection, in planning water management, and agriculture, and teaching, and for the Geological Surveys of several different countries, for museums, for universities, for the army, and in publishing and finance, and business and many many other areas too. Maybe if people had more information about what you can do that isn’t the first little bit of maths-physics-chemistry that you get at school more people would chose those options? What do you think?