Abstract
This chapter emphasises how identity and gender identity in particular, can play an important role in shaping children’s attitudes to science and science aspirations. We illustrate our arguments with empirical data from the ASPIRES (Science Aspirations and Career Choice age 10–14 (See www.kcl.ac.uk/aspires and www.tisme-scienceandmaths.org)) project–a 5 year, longitudinal English study of children’s science aspirations and career choice age 10–14. Drawing on our analyses of girls’ aspirations in particular (Archer et al. Sci Edu 96(6):967–989, 2012b, J Edu Policy, Published on iFirst, 23/5/13, 2013), we suggest that the versions of femininity that girls see as possible and desirable for themselves (and the gendered identities that they ‘do’, or ‘perform’ in their everyday lives) will affect the extent to which they see science aspirations as ‘for me’. In particular, we propose that prevalent popular associations of science with ‘cleverness’ and ‘masculinity’ deter the majority of girls from seeing science as ‘for me’ and mean that those girls who are developing science aspirations (i) have to engage in considerable identity work to reconcile their aspirations with ‘acceptable’ gender identity performances and (ii) face additional challenges to maintaining their aspirations over time.
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Notes
- 1.
9319 Year 6 students from 279 schools (248 state schools; 31 independent schools) completed the Phase 1 questionnaire between October and December 2009. (The Phase 2 survey took place in autumn 2011 and phase 3 will occur in winter/spring 2013.) The sample represented all regions of the country and was roughly proportional to the overall national distribution of schools in England by attainment and proportion of students eligible for free school meals. Of the students who completed the survey there were: 51 % boys, 49 % girls; 846 (9 %) in private schools, 8,473 (91 %) in state schools; 75 % White, 9 % Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi heritage), 8 % Black (Black African, Black Caribbean), 1 % Far Eastern, 8 % mixed or other. The survey itself covered topics such as: aspirations in science; attitudes towards school science; self-concept in science; images of scientists; participation in science-related activities outside of school; parental expectations; parental school involvement; parental attitudes towards science; and peer attitudes towards school and towards school science.
- 2.
Social class categorisations were assigned by the lead author and second author using the NS-SEC (an official UK government classification system for socio-economic status) as a guide to categorise parental occupations. Ethnicity was assigned based on self/parental reported ethnic background.
- 3.
i.e. 3 % of boys and 2 % of the girls are ‘science keen’.
- 4.
- 5.
Due to the problems in getting children age 10/11 to self-report their parental occupations in order to enable a more accurate assignment of social class, we also used items designed to ascertain measures of ‘cultural capital’, to provide a rough and ready indication of social class (see DeWitt et al. 2012). In the whole sample, 25 % of children were classified as having low or very low cultural capital and 41 % as having high or very high cultural capital.
- 6.
In the interview sample there were proportionally more students from upper and lower middle-class backgrounds than from working-class backgrounds, so to an extent this is a reflection of the sample – yet the imbalance is clearly reflected in that just one of the science aspirant girls was from a working-class background as compared to the over-representation of working-class girls among those classified as having no science aspirations (see Archer et al. (2013a, b) for discussion of data from girls with no science aspirations).
- 7.
Principal component analysis is a way of measuring which items in a survey group together (are responded to in similar ways) and therefore suggest factors or components that underlie responses to survey items.
- 8.
‘kiss up’ means to falsely flatter or in this case, to express a false opinion in order to gain favour with the interviewer.
- 9.
The term ‘Bluestocking’ was originally a derisory term applied in eighteenth century England to denote women with scholarly and intellectual interests, but is currently popularly used to denote academic women. The term is used here as a (non-derisory)shorthand to capture and foreground the academic and ‘non-girly’ nature of these girls’ identity performances and their lack of interest in performing more ‘popular’ hetero-normative femininities. Like Renold’s (2005) ‘square-girls’ who are ‘high-achieving, hard-working, rule-following and lacked any interest in popular fashion or ‘boys’ either as friends or boyfriends’ (p. 64), the ‘Bluestocking’ girls in our study constructed themselves (and were described by their parents) as ‘non-girly’ and preoccupied with academic success.
- 10.
Post-compulsory examinations in the final year of UK secondary education, typically when students are aged 17/18. Used typically as entry requirements to university.
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Archer, L., DeWitt, J. (2015). Science Aspirations and Gender Identity: Lessons from the ASPIRES Project. In: Henriksen, E., Dillon, J., Ryder, J. (eds) Understanding Student Participation and Choice in Science and Technology Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7793-4_6
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