Home, school and the museum: shifting gender performances and engagement with science

Abstract

Research has highlighted that engagement with science is highly gendered and that the masculinised culture of science makes it difficult for many girls/women to engage. Meanwhile, a growing body of research has explored the potential of out-of-school spaces to provide more equitable engagement opportunities. In this paper, I examine engagement with science among working-class, self-identified ‘girly’ girls aged 11-13. I discuss how gender performances and engagement with science shifted across science lessons, school trips and family trips to science museums. The findings suggest that engagement with science is complex, contradictory and varies across spaces – girls’ performances of hyper-femininity supported engagement with science in some spaces, but made it difficult in others. Different spaces also afforded the girls different opportunities for performing gender, which in some instances opened up new ways for engaging with science. I conclude by discussing the implications for more equitable science education.

Keywords:

• Engagement with science
• gender performativity
• gender intelligibility
• school family
• museum

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank participating teachers and families for taking part in this research. Further thanks go to my wonderfully supportive PhD supervisors Louise Archer and Emily Dawson, the wider research team on the Enterprising Science project (Jennifer DeWitt, Heather King, Ada Mau, Effrosyni Nomikou and Amy Seakins), Anna Danielsson for comments on earlier drafts and the two anonymous reviewers who helped improve this paper with their generous and kind feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Rosalind Driver Scholarship Fund at King’s College London.