The Research Files Episode 47: Gender bias in Science education

Our guest for today’s episode of the Research Files is Dr Carol Newall, a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Macquarie University. She joins us today to talk about a study she led which investigates how a child’s gender impacts an adults’ perception of their ability and their enjoyment of Science. The 80 adult participants in this study were all Macquarie University students, 20 of whom were education students and 60 were studying psychology. These adults were given a fictional profile of an eight-year-old child with the task of teaching that child over Skype. Each child’s fictional profile was experimentally manipulated depending on whether they were boy or girl, and the stereotypes associated with that gender. For example, one child liked tea parties and the colour pink and another liked climbing trees and the colour blue. As Dr Newall will explain in today’s episode, the results from this study revealed that participants rated girls as less academically capable than boys in Physics, and they delivered less scientific information during their teaching module when they believed they were teaching a girl.