Gender Mainstreaming in STEM Education

Gender mainstreaming has been defined internationally as a strategy or means to achieve gender equality. It is a process that involves the integration of a gender perspective into the preparation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies, measures and programmes, with a view to promoting equality between women and men, and combating discrimination.

Implementing gender mainstreaming in higher education implies a reorganisation of the universities’ present governance and management processes, in all areas at all levels, while strengthening the existing equality work by making it more strategic and comprehensive. Besides, mainstreaming gender at university also has an important focus on teaching and research, its two key activities.

The Gender Mainstreaming in STEM education track researches ways to incorporate a gender perspective in the studies of these fields and so improve the quality of instruction and the social relevance of the resulting knowledge. The paradigm and principles of feminist pedagogy are employed to stimulate students’ critical thinking and to transform the teaching/learning process so that students become aware of existing gender biases, roles and stereotypes and are better qualified to avoid gender blindness in their future professional careers.

Feminist education—the feminist classroom—is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgement of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university. Most importantly, feminist pedagogy should engage students in a learning process that makes the world “more rather than less real.”

(bell hooks, 1988, p.51)