When Dr Joanna Sikora saw the gender disparity between boys and girls in maths and science subjects in a report this week, it wasn’t the gaps in year 8 that shocked her.
Sure, the girls in that year had gone backwards on the 2019 results of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss), while the skills of boys remained steady and improved.
But it’s the gap at earlier stages of schooling – in year 4 – that really caused the sociology researcher from the Australian National University (ANU) the most concern.
“I would ring alarm bells … because small differences that are growing have the capacity to become big differences,” Sikora says.
The Timss report, published on behalf of the commonwealth by the Australian Council for Educational Research, analysed the skills of year 4 and 8 students. It found Australian primary school students recorded their best ever results.
But for the first time there was a gender gap in favour of boys across both maths and science in both years 4 and 8, at the same time programs have been rolled out to bridge Australia’s Stem crisis.
Internationally Australia recorded the equal-widest gender gap alongside France in year 4 maths achievement.
About 76% of males were above the national proficient standard, compared with just 68% of girls, while there were also more very high performers (17% compared with 10%).
The lead author of the report, Nicole Wernert, said the differences were primarily due to a significantly higher percentage of male students being very high performers. But she says the slide for girls in year 8 is concerning.
“It’s a warning line that suggests we need to start paying attention,” she said.
Challenge to rewrite the narrative
According to Sikora, fewer than 2% of Australian mothers to teenage boys worked in engineering or similar occupations. Fewer than 2% of Australian teenage boys sought careers in teaching.
Sikora says the persistence of the gender gap in science and mathematics needed to be viewed in big picture terms – which were cultural rather than biological.
“We all feel we’re unique individuals and tend to do what other people like us do,” she says.
“There are things boys and girls feel they are good at, and they specialise in what they believe they enjoy – which reflect gender stereotypes, but are part of the ideology of supporting individual choices.”
She points to data showing nearly one-third of girls in New South Wales are opting out of mathematics in year 11 and 12, but are more likely to dominate humanities and social science subjects.
“The narrative of education [in the west] is about enjoyment, because we believe if they don’t enjoy it they can’t learn,” she says. “Kids will do what the culture is guiding them to do.”
So Sikora points to a country like India, which has a high proportion of women excelling in Stem subjects such as nuclear physics, as an example of what a different education system may look like.
The challenge, Sikora says, is to rewrite narratives of science and maths as a “boring and difficult” pursuit to something that benefits humankind.
There’s also the need to change social discourse suggesting “girls don’t do science and maths”, according to Dr Steven Lewis at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education.
“There’s been attempts to redress that, but while teaching is still highly skewed towards women, science and maths is overrepresented by male teachers,” he says.
“At the same time, Stem subjects in primary and high school require discipline-specific knowledge from the teacher, and we’re seeing an out-of-field teaching effect, particularly in hard to staff positions around rural and remote Australia.
“That creates larger classes or teachers without discipline-specific knowledge, which has a compounding effect. The gendered approaches to subjects and degrees reflect the conditions students experience at school.”
‘The elephant in the room is disadvantage’
Lewis also says the more important disparities were among low socioeconomic students and affluent students – particularly in regional and rural areas.
“A year 4 girl is much closer to year 4 boy, if you’re comparing a metropolitan school or an advantaged background to a rural community in the NT,” he says.
“Our top performing students perform very well but we have a very long tail of underperformance. The elephant in the room is disadvantage.”
The director of the Stem Teacher Enrichment Academy at the University of Sydney, Prof Manjula Sharma, agrees.
She says Australia had come out “well placed” in the Timss results, but persistent inequities remained.
There were some caveats – English as a Second Language speakers showed no statistical difference from their counterparts, suggesting efforts to boost outcomes were working well.
“It reaches a point that it’s a self-fulfilling prophesy … have we reached the stage where there’s so much attention [on girls] it’s self-inhibiting?” she says.
A study released last year found female scientists were almost entirely omitted from the Australian curriculum, with researchers warning the “alarming” lack of representation could be contributing to the gender gap in the field of Stem.
“We have a big emphasis on measuring impact, and it is important, but if that boils down to counting numbers [of participants] we’re doing a disservice,” Sharma says.
“We need to shift societal attitudes, ask the experiences are of students, and move towards a balanced approach.
“What we want is boys numbers to go up as well as the girls – if we have programs, we should have physics for everyone and some specialised programs for girls, so we’re increasing total participation numbers.”
