Science Education for Girls

For over a century, the nexus of gender issues and educational policy and practice have taken on a cyclical nature-most recently in the early 1990s when the American Association of University Women (AAUW) outlined the ways U.S. schools “shortchanged” girls, especially in math and science, and the ways curriculum and teacher-student interactions encouraged the silencing of females. Thereafter, in the late 1990s, the focus switched to boys who, it was argued, were not receiving an equitable education due to the feminization of the teaching profession; the perceived inability of female teachers to understand, reach, and teach boys; and the overemphasis on meeting the needs of female students.