– The students in the survey who were planning to take physics post-16 largely mirrored wider patterns of postcompulsory physics participation, being predominantly White or South Asian, male, from more affluent backgrounds, and higher attaining.
– Boys seemed to report more positive views from their physics teachers; for instance, by responding “strongly agree” to “My teacher thinks I am good at physics.”
– Students’ engineering aspirations were highly gendered; of those aspiring to be an engineer, 75.7% were male and 24.3% were female.
– Across both the qualitative and quantitative data, young people reported experiencing and constructing physics as aligned with masculinity and cleverness due to it being a hard subject. Students and parents reported that physics had a better fit with masculinity, while biology had a better fit with femininity.
– In order to produce themselves as physicists, the girls interviewed (and their supporters, such as schools and family) were engaging in extensive identity work and needed to deploy significant amounts of capital to make possible a seemingly impossible subject position.
– Their analyses suggest that the conditions required to possibilize a female physics identity
may be highly rarefied and elite—and the necessary identity work and resource deployment to be extreme.
– Authors consider the exclusion of girls/women from physics to be a social injustice that needs to be challenged, both for the good of underrepresented groups but also in the interests of creating socially just science.
2017 - The “Exceptional” Physics Girl: A Sociological Analysis of Multimethod Data from Young Women Aged 10-16 to Explore Gendered Patterns of Post-16 Participation
The main theoretical perspectives used in this article are Bourdieuism and Butlerism.
Data comes from the Aspires2 Project, which is part of a 10-year longitudinal study funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. This article uses data from the second phase of the study, focusing on the survey and interviews with students in Year 11 (age 15-16 years). This included a nationally representative survey of schools, completed by 13,421 self-selected students in England, recruited from 340 secondary schools.
Variables include: age, gender, ethnicity, cultural capital, general aspirations, aspirations in science, subject preferences, attitudes toward school science (physics, biology, and chemistry), post-16 choices, images of scientists, self-concept in science, perceptions of self and others’ gender identity, participation in science-related activities outside of school, parental attitudes toward science, peer attitudes toward school and school science, careers education, and work experiences.
The authors then focus on interviews with 7 girls who aspired to continue with physics post-16. Topics included how the cultural arbitrary of physics requires girls to be highly “exceptional,” undertaking great identity work to “possibilize” a physics identity.