How quickly girls' perceptions change — a picture is worth a thousand words

How to encourage girls' interest in tech — Newsletter No. 37

Researchers have measured how much one short summer program can affect girls’ perceptions, and the results are a good guideline for what we could change.

The FEMME program is an engineering summer course, focusing on girls between 9 and 14 years of age.

In addition to classroom learning, the course entails hands-on activities, laboratory experiments, field trips, and counseling sessions. The girls are introduced to female engineers and have the opportunity to see first-hand the career options available to them.

The most often used tool to measure the impact of programs like this is MATE survey, which measures perceptions and attitudes towards a topic. But, in this case, the researchers included one more method — Draw An Engineer Test, which has been developed to more fully evaluate young students perceptions of who engineers are and what they actually do.

Students are asked to draw a picture of an engineer at work and write a short sentence describing what the engineer is doing in the picture.

The results of the girls' responses to the MATE did not really provide any new information; previous research has shown the same small increase in the girls' attitudes toward STEM along with a seemingly significant increase in their knowledge of careers in engineering.

What did the pictures say?

A change in the perceptions have been changed, and here are some attributes that showed most difference.

Examination of the engineers' gender in the girls' drawings revealed that even though the girls indicated that they did not agree that “Boys are better at being engineers than girls are” (even before the program began), more than 90% of the girls drew male engineers at the beginning of the program.

Although it was encouraging to find that more girls drew female engineers at the end of the program, only about 20% of them did so.

But, when looking at individual results, the change looks more significant, with some girls drastically changing their perceptions.

One of the misconceptions among students is that engineering is not much of a team work. So, what came out as a large change in the drawings is adding teams of people, rather than individuals.

Girls' average responses to most of the subscales on the MATE did not change significantly from the beginning to the end of the FEMME program, but their perceptions about who engineers are and what they do appear to have changed considerably when you examine their drawings of “engineers at work.”

What can parents do with this?

Various studies have shown that women often opt out of tech and engineering because they don’t understand careers and what a job entails. We’ve written about this before here.

Studies indicate that girls start to underestimate their own technical abilities starting at the age of 6 and that during their schooling, they tend to focus on what they think they are better at. Early intervention is required to address this problem because once female students reach college, it is too late.

So, be the one to provide examples and various role models.

In our newsletter archive, you can find relevant ideas on engaging your girls’ interest in tech and counterbalancing the overwhelming narrative.

Read the full paper here: Middle school girls' perceptions of engineers before and after a female only summer enrichment program. Available from: [accessed Oct 07 2024].