The lack of female role models and success stories during early education undermine the prospects of young girls to engage in technology degrees, president of the Catalan Technology Society and professor of materials and expert in metallurgy at Catalonia’s Polytechnic University, Núria Salán, told EURACTIV.
In Engineering, Industry, and Construction degrees, 29.5% of women are in the 2020-21 course, while computer science goes as low as 14.1%, a Spanish Ministry of Education report found.
Apart from her job in academia, Salán also actively recruits young talent to follow a technology career path, seeking out female talent by attending elementary, middle, and high schools and making technology more approachable.
“We are half and half, and we consume and use technology half and half as well. Therefore, I don’t understand why only part of the population should design it, and this is the discourse I take to schools”, Salán said during the European Leadership Academy in Valencia, which aims at empowering young women to become leaders in the digital age.
She argued that in a digital age where tech skills are required transversally across professions and sectors, it is essential to bring equality to the classrooms.
Currently, only 20% of engineers in Spain are women, and in the coming 10 years, the country will need 200.000 extra engineers to cover labour demand, a study by Spain’s Engineering Observatory in 2022 found.
“That is why we need to incorporate, and that is why we are working so hard not to lose any talent and, above all, the girls’ point of view”, Salán added.
More female role models in textbooks
In battling the gender gap in tech degrees, Salán has identified two main reasons for the lack of female talent., “the most painful ones, because they are difficult to change”.
Firstly, no names of women in STEM are in the textbooks used in schools “further than Marie Curie”.
“The girls may think that maybe there have been no female inventors, and that makes them think that they will be the first. That is worrying for them, and it’s not true”.
As a response, Salán is “chasing” publishing houses and the Catalan and Spanish governments to include more names in the curricular education material, including contemporary successful figures such as renewable energy company Holaluz’s founders or Judit Giró, a biomedical engineer who invented the first urine test to breast cancer.
“I suggest a few of them, and I say put three or four [role models in textbooks], only this already awakens the girls’ curiosity”, she said.
Salán has identified 8,500 women in STEM who could serve as examples to inspire young girls and is assembling an encyclopaedia with illustrator Sandra Uve. And to address the lack of examples in school, is offering this encyclopedia for free to both the Catalan and Spanish Ministry of Education to distribute it to schools.
Demotivated teachers
The second “painful” reason, according to Salán, is the lack of elementary and middle school teachers passionate about technology. Teachers at first levels of education mostly have training in humanities and social sciences but no training in STEM.
“Then you are in primary school, which is the first contact with discovery, and the person talking to you about technology does so obliged and without passion”, Salán said.
Faced with this, the Catalan Technology Society is organising training programmes and volunteering schemes to inspire teachers.
The Catalan and Spanish governments “should also change the schoolteaching degree plan so that no one leaves university without a minimum of technological training, at least without panic to it”, Salán added.
(Max Griera| EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
