Gender Stereotypes in Science and Technology Essay

Gender Stereotypes in Science and Technology The experiences we have and the ideas we formulate as children can and do have a tremendous impact on what we do with our lives as adults. One thing that we studied during this course was the differences between toys that boys play with and those that girls play with. When little boys are given things to play with like chemistry sets and erector sets, they are given tools to develop skills like mechanical ability and spatial perception. More importantly, in my opinion, this sets up a stereotype about what activities are suitable for boys and which activities are suitable for girls. Just as boys who play with dolls are seen as being unusual, little girls who do boy things and play with†¦show more content†¦One of the more interesting articles which I found was entitled Masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and cognitive performance: A meta-analysis, and was published in volume 100 of Psychological Bulletin. In this study, Margaret Signorella and Wesley Jamison evaluated the hyp othesis set forth by SC Nash in the 1975 article The relationship among sex-role stereotyping, sex-role preference, and the sex difference in spatial visualization. Nash found that sixth and ninth graders who showed a preference for being male performed better on tests evaluating spatial relations, and she proposed that children will perform better on cognitive tasks typically associated with the gender which matches their personal self-concepts. Signorella and Jamison found that high masculine-low feminine self-concept scores were associated with better performance on math and spatial tasks for both girls and boys. Both mathematical and spatial skills are necessary for technical careers such as engineering and computer science, and these results suggests that girls who show a preference for male activities may have the skills necessary for pursing one of these career paths. This study looked at children in the early stages of adolescence, however, which is a time when mathematical abilities, as measured by standardized tests, are pretty much equal between genders. The effects encountered in high school, both academic and social, do notShow MoreRelatedGender Differences and the Threat of Gender Stereotype in Science Education1045 Words   |  5 PagesGender differences in education is something of a common topic among educational studies since intensification in the 1970’s (Breakwell, 2003, p. 437). Gender differences among the subjects taught in school has been found to be somewhat more of a social construct rather than a concept that has any kind of scientific explanation because of th e idea of gender differences being taken and changed into the idea of a gender stereotype in most parts of education (Crilly, 2013, p. 1). 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