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SecondarySTEM

Girls in STEM – When I saw how disengaged they were with it at my school, I had to take action

Amy Ryman explains how she smashed the stereotypes of science, technology, engineering and maths

Amy Ryman
by Amy Ryman
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Having spent the week in assemblies advertising the new STEM club for KS4, and emphasising all being welcome, the end of the day arrives and I watch with an increasingly heavy heart the rabble of students crashing into the classroom.

“Forty students, that’s amazing!” my second in charge exclaims afterwards – but I can’t help but feel concerned that only two of them were girls.

I was pleased at the turn out, but I was not going to let anyone miss out on this; and after a bit of digging it appeared I was teetering on the tip of an iceberg.

“We don’t get a look in” said one of the girls, and, “They’re too loud” complained another, when I asked them why they hadn’t come. “What about a club of your own… just for girls?” I suggested. “Can there be cake?” wondered another student.

So it was set up for the following week. I warned them there wouldn’t be anything ‘girly’ happening – we’d be covering the same content as the other STEM club.

Baking cakes at midnight the night before the launch, I wondered how many I should make. Feeling somewhat optimistic, I went for 30, thinking we could always take them to the staffroom if no one turned up.

Walking down the corridor at the end of the following day, a rather frazzled looking NQT came rushing towards me. “There’s a big group of girls outside your classroom, and they won’t move along,” she told me.

“They said they are waiting for you!” I started to smile – and to my absolute amazement, when I arrived at the door there were 30 girls waiting to get in. And that was only year 9; by the time we started sixty girls were crammed into the classroom, sharing the cakes one between two!

‘Weird, in a good way’

During the weeks that followed, the girls kept coming back (even without cake). They told us how it felt at last to have a club they could feel ‘comfortable’ in, with the opportunity to ‘make mistakes and it be ok’, and to ‘bring art and science together, which is weird, but in a good way’.

That term the girls designed and built prototypes of devices to help others. One group came up with a simple distiller which could be used in the developing world, to help clean the water from stagnant pools.

Another group worked on a female friendly Duke of Edinborough back pack, and there was also my favourite innovation, washable sanitary products for homeless women.

It was in that classroom the idea of STEMgirls Club was born. Almost half (49%) of secondary state schools had no girls taking physics at A level last year. Less than 10% of employers in STEM are female. And yet in a survey of 300 female engineers, 84% were either happy or extremely happy with their career choice.

STEMgirls Club is aimed at 14 to 16 year olds and consists of ten sessions per term delivered by a teacher at the school and resourced by STEMgirls Club. Staff are equipped with materials that engage the girls in the vanities of engineering and link to engineering careers.

Activities range from designing prosthetic limbs for landmine victims in Uganda, to designing devices and coding them to alert people with disabilities when, for example, their bath has run enough.

Their own words

Although it is still early days, we’ve already been getting some great feedback. “Ever since I was really young, I’d been brought up in an environment where I was constantly taught and told that women are and always will be inferior to men because they simply just don’t ‘have it in them’. And I believed it,” said one participant.

“But then STEM club became a sort of big thing and I thought ‘hmmm, might as well’. If I’m being honest, I thought that STEMgirls would be really girly and cheesy so I wasn’t that interested but I gave it a go anyway and I was really wrong. We do all sorts of cool things like making prosthetic limbs and now I’m starting learn and embrace lots of new skills I never thought I had in me!”

“After joining STEM club I realised how important me being a female interested in physics and maths could be to the real world,” commented another. “I realised I could be someone who could change the way we live in the world. In the future I want to take physics and maths A Level, because of the club’.

Studies have shown that girls take time, and require a lot of questions to be answered, before embarking on a particular career path. STEMgirls club, running over the year, is designed to nurture and allow time and the positive role models required for young women to explore these questions in a safe and unthreatening environment.

Participating schools are also invited to visit STEM businesses, be visited by female STEM role models and have first hand links with STEM businesses providing opportunities for work experience, apprenticeships and post graduate positions.

Of course in the long run these girls will need to learn how to adjust to working in what is likely initially to be a predominantly male environment. However STEMgirls club has started to address gender stereotyping in the classroom more generally.

The boys in the school see their female peers in a different light now, raising the girls’ profile and throwing up questions about unconscious gender bias in our teaching; which has in turn led to teacher training on how not to reinforce gender stereotyping.

If you would like to know more about STEMgirls club or want to join the movement, visit stemgirlsclub.com.


4 ways to wake girls up to their STEM potential

  • Set up a girls only club
  • Be mindful of the images you use in your teaching resources – try to include equal number of female and male examples
  • Try not to use gendered language when referring to jobs and careers in STEM
  • Actively seek out diverse teachers for your team – and in any case, invite positive female role models to your school

Amy Ryman is head of science at Harris City Academy Crystal Palace.

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