Breaking gender barriers in STEM education for achieving the SDG of quality education in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the under-representation of women in STEM education in Bangladesh, and proposes ways to boost their participation to help achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ensuring quality education for all. The key argument of this paper is that while celebrating Bangladesh’s success in reducing the gender gap in primary and secondary education, the persistent gap between women’s participation in general education and their representation in STEM subjects receives less attention. Although women students’ enrolment at the tertiary level has increased, their representation in STEM fields remains low for various reasons – societal perceptions, inadequate infrastructure, prejudice, etc. While Bangladesh has taken steps to promote gender equality in education, measures directly targeting increased participation of women in STEM education are lacking. However, in addition to implementing institutional policies to increase women's participation in STEM education, the paper recommends tackling the socio-cultural obstacles that discourage women from doing so.

KEYWORDS:

• SDG
• gender gap
• STEM education
• tertiary level
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of the CMU Presidential Scholarship, which enabled Nazmul Islam to pursue his master’s degree (MA) in Social Science with a specialisation in Development Studies under faculty of Social Sciences at Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand that provided the basis for this paper. The authors also acknowledge the use of AI language editing services for language error correction and the support of Colin Rudland Roth for proofreading the revised draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.