What is Seeing Gender: Tools for Change?

Seeing Gender, an NSF funded project, was designed to develop and test an interactive CD-ROM that can be used as an instructional device for pre-service and inservice teachers, teacher education faculty, and college faculty in STEM fields. The CD-ROM is intended to 1) introduce educators and future educators to research on gender and gender socialization, 2) sensitize users to the gender bias that operates in STEM classrooms and programs, and 3) expose users to classroom strategies and interventions designed to reduce gender
bias. The overall goal of this project is to reduce gender bias in STEM classes and programs and increase the number of women who pursue STEM classes and careers.

Seeing Gender: Tools for Change was created in 2005 by the Seeing Gender team at Kansas State University. Seeing Gender also includes a CD for staff development which contains places for workshops and offer staff development activities and materials. The staff development CD also contains checklist and assessment
strategies from the program CD-ROR.

The History of Seeing Gender

Most people think that gender bias in schools is a thing of the past. Certainly Title IX has had an enormous impact on schools, opening doors to increased opportunities for males and females alike. Despite the progress, the movement of women into science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers has been uneven. The involvement of women in biology has increased substantially, yet that in computer science has actually decreased. Given the extent
to which the American economy depends on STEM professionals, we can ill-afford to ignore the potential of more than half the population.
No teacher intends to treat males and females differently

– most tell their students they can become anything they choose to work hard at becoming. Yet research documents subtle differences between how many teachers treat males and females. Students
themselves hold each other accountable to their own definitions of how males and females should behave and in what fields they should excel. In many regards, the mass media remain an ubiquitous source of gender stereotypes. Psychologists suggest that we all develop
cognitive schemas organized around gender, so it really shouldn’t surprise us to learn that weunconsciously apply what we learned about gender as children to our interactions with others. Moreover,
STEM fields in which women were historically denied access have understandably come to reflect masculine values and behavioral norms.

This project evolved from my experience in teaching gender issues in education to classroom teachers for more than a decade. Because of the prevailing belief that both science and mathematics have no
gender, science and mathematics teachers were often conspicuously absent from those classes. As part of the GROW Project (National Science Foundation Grants 9975936 and 0114723), I began offering a version of the course specific to the literature on gender issues in science and mathematics classrooms in middle and high school. Teachers often entered the course believing that gender bias was either a thing of the past or probably irrelevant to their content,
but ended the course seeing both their classrooms and the American culture in very different ways. I designed the course initially believing that the more firmly established research base would be more readily
accepted by the teachers, only to find that much of what remains speculative assertions about male and female styles in posing hypotheses or conducting experiments seemed more salient to the teachers. Both the teachers and I gradually came to see how incredibly complex the issue actually is.

Much of this exchange of expertise between the teachers and myself is captured in Seeing Gender – Tools for Change. The interactive CD-ROM is designed to provide a resource with which science and
mathematics teachers, either alone or as a faculty, can explore what the research identifies as reasons why females sometimes fail to develop or sustain interest in STEM classrooms. The inclusion of reasons is deliberately broad – not all will apply to every teacher.
However, the teachers who participated in my class assure me that collectively they found all of these topics helpful. As a result, science and mathematics teachers should gain some insight into why females
often lose interest in STEM fields as well as strategies for encouraging them to stay involved. Simply developing an awareness of the subtle messages discouraging females from continuing in STEM fields offers teachers a valuable tool with which to change the
climate in their classrooms.

Jackie Spears
Manhattan, KS
May 5, 2006