Effect of providing gender equality information on students' motivations to choose STEM

PLoS One. 2021 Jun 23;16(6):e0252710. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252710. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

The social climate for women studying STEM subjects is changing, but the proportion of women taking STEM subjects in Japan is small. Only 27.9% of university students in the department of science is women in 2019. In this study, we used an online survey to investigate whether randomly providing three types of gender equality information increased the motivation of junior high school students to choose STEM subjects and the motivation of their parents to support that choice. Information on STEM, especially about social equality, and information on math stereotypes and STEM occupations, increased students' motivations for studying STEM. This suggests that providing gender equality information is an effective way to change students' attitudes toward STEM.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Attitude
  • Career Choice*
  • Engineering / education*
  • Female
  • Gender Equity*
  • Humans
  • Information Dissemination / methods
  • Internet
  • Japan
  • Male
  • Mathematics / education*
  • Motivation*
  • Occupations / classification
  • Parents / psychology
  • Science / education*
  • Students / psychology*
  • Surveys and Questionnaires / statistics & numerical data
  • Technology / education*

Grants and funding

This work was funded by a Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST)-RISTEX (Research Institute of Science and Technology for Society) research program (number JPMJRX17B3), JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19K12602 and World Premier International Research Center Initiative (WPI), MEXT, Japan.