PHYSICS teachers should be provided with sports cars and persuaded to
adopt a more glamorous lifestyle to encourage more girls to take up careers
in science and engineering, a conference was told yesterday. Women scientists
were also told that they should dress like the Spice Girls with high platform
trainers rather than wear expensive sober suits.
Averil Macdonald, 41, an educational consultant and part-time
physics lecturer who drives a BMW 320i and a Porsche 911, said the image
of science had to be made more fashionable. She told the Institute of Physics
annual congress that science, particularly physics, to be seen as a worthwhile,
rewarding, high-prestige career.
Giving all physics teachers an expensive car and other trappings
of success would show that society values science, not just to girls but
also boys, she told the Salford conference. "If we agree we need more scientists
because they contribute to the nation's wealth, then we have to persuade
people to do science. At the moment, we are patently not doing that.
"And if we are not encouraging girls into science, we are wasting
half the talent of the population," she said. Even if it was accepted that
there were sex differences in the brain, "girls have a lot to contribute
to furthering scientific knowledge". They were put off because of a "terrible
problem with the stereotypical image of the scientist".
In cartoons, scientists appeared as mad professors while mainstream
scientists were seen as anonymous individuals on the "periphery of normality"
rather than inspirational figures. "A flashy car shows that you can be
a scientist without being totally boring," agreed Prof Liz Tanner, an engineer
at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, who drives a bright red TVR
sports car.
Britain's highest profile female scientist, Prof Susan Greenfield,
director of the Royal Institution, London, said science needed a sexier
image though she placed more emphasis on style."It is not so much that
you have to look very rich," said the neuroscientist.
"Indeed if you look like Richard Branson, his dubious taste in
knitwear might be something you wouldn't want," she said, stressing it
was "important to get the right image". "Young people, especially girls,
are very sensitive to how trendy something looks," said Prof Greenfield.
Rather than having wealthy teachers, it would be more important
to have "more physics teachers looking like the Spice Girls". They would
not have to wear an expensive suit but "platform trainers or whatever the
Spice Girls wear," said Prof Greenfield, who shares a Rolls-Royce Silver
Shadow with her husband but "hates driving".
The congress was told by Ms Macdonald that single-sex science
classes for all pupils over the age of 11 would encourage girls. It was
a "well-researched fact" that girls from single-sex schools did better
at science than those in mixed schools, whereas boys did better when both
boys and girls were present. It was often argued that mixed classes were
better because the girls had a "civilising" influence on the boys.
In other words, said Ms Macdonald, who taught at Kenilworth, a
mixed comprehensive in Warwickshire, the educational system was prepared
to sacrifice girls' potential achievements to let the boys do their best.
Teaching styles might add to the problem. While boys were generally willing
to take risks and see getting an answer wrong sometimes as part of the
price they paid to "win" at other times, girls shied away from being tripped
up.
To encourage more girls into science and engineering, teaching
styles should be more co-operative. She said that girls got better results
with continuous assessment and questioned why more marks were given for
exam performance.
Experiments that will collide beams of gold nuclei together to try to create
the kind of nuclear matter that made up the universe in its first ten-millionths
of a second of existence are to start next month.
"We're hoping to heat up matter to such a high temperature
and pressure that it's like being in the heart of a supernova or neutron
star - but rather more experimentally accessible," Prof John Nelson, of
Birmingham University, told the congress.