Your very own BBC correspondent

Here I am again, folks! This one is a mystery to me:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25243274

It tells us that:

I wouldn't mind a small punt on around half of the students doing worse than average too. Can anyone make sense of this article?

I should perhaps acknowledge its meaningful implication: that the former secondary-school bias that created present biases in tertiary education has not been rectified, but if that is the finding/inference why not just state it?

And then the BBC complaints department comes up with this classic, just to wind me up further!



I wonder what that is in Celsius!

It's all very well blaming schools for gender bias. But parents often play a significant part towards gender conditioning well before school?

Take toys. Most little girls are given Dollies, fluffy toys & things that need taking care of (Nurturing) and all in predominantly pink & pastel shades.

Little boys are generally given toys that are more mechanical, things that come apart and require re-building. Boys toys usually include more competitive elements too with winners and losers, goodies and baddies.

So it should be no surprise that in academic circles our conditioning bias continues. It even goes on after school. If you look around any workplace there are predominantly male and female roles. Yes there are exceptions but they are just that.

What we always need to be mindful of is that those exceptions must be made on merit, not just on desire. There is nothing worse than breaking gender boundaries but then having to continually make exceptions to cover inadequacy.

I think this actually tells us that the BBC's science reporter has no understanding of what an average is....

Might be urban legend, but i half remember some idiot on R4 who thought that all school children should have the right to expect better than average exam results. Err, right....

Not to mention a USA president who was disturbed by the same fact.

Be afraid……be very afraid.

it is all very interesting. I am a Physics Teachers, and while qualifying, did a brief bit of research on the dearth of female physics teachers, which contributes to this whole cycle.

Institute of Physics (backed up by many sources) produced figures showing that the majority of graduates going into teaching are female, but that fewer and fewer females are studying Physics at school, so although there are more female teachers, less of them proportionally are teaching Physics (as an example of a male dominated subject).

This is contributing to a lack of Physics teachers generally, meaning Physics in many schools is taught by non-specialists who generally (apologies to any non-specialist teachers teaching Physics out there) dumb down the subject and are not brave in making it hands on, active, and exciting - so, it cannot compete with Biology (where you get to cut things up and go pond dipping), or Chemistry (where you get to burn things and blow things up).

My view is tongue in cheek of course, but although the BBC reporting was poor, the underlying story is correct.

Pretty much.

A journalist's go-to pitch, like transport articles on Mondays, is a gender shock-horror when looking for a "newsworthy" item.

Why we don't just accept and celebrate la difference and let gals be gals and vice versa, let each one do what they're good at with equal opportunity (and pay) for both, is beyond me.

But that would *never* do.

That would imply *shock* non-equality!

As Wombat implies - the problem is less women science graduates than science graduates at all; and it may well be down to role models in the class room. And since there are fewer and fewer men teaching *anything*, is it a surprise?

Though one might wonder about 'acceptance of traditional roles' reportedly exhibited by schools, I'm not convinced that in *any* arena it is necessary to have a population exactly mirroring the population at large.

There is one overriding requirement to perform a task: the ability to perform it. This requirement is irrespective of age, gender, sexual preference, ethnic background, physical ability or lack thereof, religion, marital status, education, nationality, or any of the other hundred and one things people find to differentiate themselves from everyone else.

If you cannot perform the task, you should not be doing it. Under *no* circumstances should your selection for the task be informed by the secondary characteristics above, unless there are overriding requirements, as for a role model. But even then, if you cannot perform the task, even as a role model you will fail and you should not be appointed.

It is not that 'more girls should be encouraged to take up STEM subjects'; it is that more pupils in general should be so encouraged. People should not be taught to take the courses that lead to easy and pointless qualifications; they should be encouraged to do the courses that are *hard*, where it is facts and logical deduction that matter, not merely the parroting of opinions.

(And of course, physics is the science from which all else flows.)

Anyone who chooses to teach has my admiration and respect; as an interested party with 4 kids/stepkids in secondary education, I am by turns impressed, frustrated, touched and depressed by the education system, some of the people working within it and the attitude and expectations of the community at large. My own two children are in the French education system and I can tell you from attending numerous parents' evenings (as dire and unfulfilling for all concerned over there as here) that French teachers feel as undervalued and mucked about as their British counterparts. My experience is that France concentrates more on basic "traditional" skills and focuses more on academic achievement than the UK. I admit my sample size is small and probably unrepresentative, but it is what I have observed.

I think it is important to acknowledge that there will always be outstanding pupils in all subjects; they will not always get the standard of education or the level of nurturing they need to excel, but the raw materials will be there. But take a look around at our society; we seek the easy route to absolutely everything. Sometimes this is down to good old-fashioned laziness, but it is encouraged by all kinds of external influences from the reluctance to allow kids to walk to school or play outside to the abundance of information freely available to all.

In the past, dammit, in my lifetime, teachers were the holders of knowledge and students went to them to have the knowledge imparted. The transaction was simple and its success was relatively easy to monitor with exams.

That situation has changed beyond recognition. My own offspring, but especially my stepkids, are expected to find information from all kinds of other sources; their level of access to knowledge is beyond the dreams of our grandparents. This has arisen so quickly that very few individuals and no education systems have learned to harness it properly. A huge proportion of the information in the public domain is inaccurate, unsubstantiated, incomplete, deliberately misleading and even harmful. But if our kids are taught to be efficiently discerning, then the potential for them to go far further in pretty much any discipline you care to name than we can teach them in traditional schools is awesome indeed.

I'm routinely shocked and disappointed at how little homework my stepkids are set (and equally outraged at how my daughter is a prisoner to the mountains she is expected to do). The neglect in the UK of basic "traditional" skills is - to me - appalling. But addressing this old chestnut requires several things, among them: 1) teachers who are motivated and respected, 2) pupils who are motivated and respected 3) a convincing case that these traditional skills are required today and not the holy cow of a bunch of uptight, angry, frustrated irrelevant old gits who can't accept that such things are not needed on our voyage to the future. (Like me).

I'm going for a lie down.