– Percent female science faculty does not have an effect on a range of science measures for both male and female students, including the ways in which they understand scientific practice, their science self-concept, and their interest in science related college majors. As qualitative data demonstrate, this could reflect practical constraints at schools where female faculty are concentrated and narrow perceptions of science teachers and ‘‘real” science.
– The qualitative data demonstrate that students respond positively to male and female science teachers who are caring, challenging, engaged, passionate, fair, and/or linked to the ‘‘actual” practice of science in some concrete way.
– Teacher gender was an issue only to the extent that female science teachers may not have had the concrete science experience that students respected and enjoyed. Of course, female science teachers might have been different from their male colleagues in other significant (and positive) ways, but this finding helps to explain why a greater proportion of female teachers might not make a net difference to students’ science (self-) perceptions and interests overall.
– One practical lesson from this finding is the importance of recruiting a greater number of former or soon-to-be female scientists into the teaching profession in order to ‘‘level the field,” and encouraging these teachers to talk about their science histories and expertise.
– Female science teachers in the sample were concentrated at public schools with a greater percentage of Latino/a and Black/African American students. This means that those students were more likely to have science teachers who did not seem like ‘‘real” scientists, and this means that they had fewer role models, or fewer sources of ‘‘credible” information available to them. This is a subtle way in which inequities in the science pipeline may be reproduced.
– More women were teaching in an environment where strong science identities were potentially mitigated by fewer contextual resources and different pedagogical demands. Perhaps these women simply had less time to actively mentor students, and less freedom or latitude to challenge dominant scientific images and assumptions, their science pedagogy as efficient (and traditional) as was that of their male colleagues. Their focus was on the basics.