The purpose of this study was to develop the i-STEM programme, an awareness initiative that would improve the participation of young women in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields in South African universities. That would serve as an intervention measure to young women’s significantly low numbers in the STEM fields, causing a gender disparity in those fields. Young women are said to be overrepresented in the fields that are at a lower level, the so-called soft disciplines and of short-term duration at tertiary level. The STEM fields, on the other hand, are well-remunerated and high-status careers, perceived as the main solution for the unprecedented socioeconomic challenges that the world is experiencing, as a result of, mainly, climate change and lack of food security.
The literature reviewed was focused on the participation of young women in the STEM fields in South Africa, Africa and globally, assisting the study to investigate the reasons for low numbers of young women in the STEM fields. The mixed method approach was of benefit to the nature of this study, a quantitative and qualitative enquiry. The study was conducted at two universities with completely different profiles, contact sessions and modes of content delivery. The third institution was the government department relating to higher education. For research design, data was collected from 111 participants who were involved with the STEM fields and/or university education. Two (2) lecturers, two (2) government officials and two (2) young female students were interviewed and 105 other participants completed the questionnaires. Some data were collected from participating institutions’ documents. Interpretation and analysis of such data, was done through concurrent, triangulation design, where data collection was done concurrently, i.e. in the same phase, in both the quantitative and qualitative manner.
The main findings blamed the different ways in which boys and girls were socialised in their communities. Girls were more exposed to matters pertaining to food and caring while boys were more exposed to cars and machines, resulting in girls preferring socially orientated careers and the boys, mechanical ones. Those findings were used as the impetus to construct Phases 1, 2 and 3 of the developed awareness programme, i.e. ‘Identification’, ‘Induction’ and ‘Implementation’, whereby the departments of Basic Education and Higher Education and Training, together with universities, would identify learners and students as mentees and mentors, who will become the advocates for breaking the above stereotypes.
Another discovery was that there is an element of cultural stereotyping in society, that the STEM fields were difficult and therefore meant for men, since they are supposed to be more demanding and not for women as soft targets; hence the environment was unsupportive of women. It also related to the classification of certain jobs as men’s and others as women’s territory. That theory was further extended through the finding that the STEM fields were more-costly than the social sciences and that most of them require a longer study period. As a result, young women who anticipate becoming mothers and wives, avoid them as careers, in consideration of their future cultural roles. Those findings influenced the last four phases of the i-STEM programme, i.e.
‘Impression’, ‘Integration’, ‘Intensification’ and ‘Ignition’, whereby cultural and classist stereotypes would be determined through baseline information and rooted out by synergy in terms of resources, research and effort by local, national and international stakeholders, as guided by the programme. / Curriculum and Instructional Studies / D. Ed. (Curriculum Studies)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/25814 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Toolo, Lineo Lynnette |
| Contributors | Dichaba, M. M. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (224, 8 leaves) : color graphs, color map, application/pdf |
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