Equitable Science Education: A Discrepancy Model

Abstract

A 15-year-old girl in rural America described the current crossroads in science when she said: ‘There are some women scientists; but men have been in it longer. Women can do the same job as men. They may have a different way of thinking and might improve science’ (Kahle, 1985, p. 68). Her words were fortuitous because they were spoken a few days before Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize for looking at maize in a different way and for thinking about genetics in a different manner. McClintock’s work, unrecognised and even scorned for decades, epitomises the disadvantages that not only individual women but also the scientific community and society as a whole suffer because of a lack of equity in science education. Perhaps Maria Mitchell, one of the first American women to be recognised as a scientist, said it best:

In my younger days, when I was pained by the half-educated, loose, and inaccurate ways which are (women) all had, I used to say ‘how much women need exact science’, but, since I have known some workers in science who were not always true to the teachings of nature, who have loved self more than science, I have now said ‘how much science needs women’. (Maria Mitchell’s presidential address to the Third Congress of Women in 1875; quoted in Rossiter, 1982, p. 15)