“Mummy, can girls be doctors, or only boys?”
This is a question that fills me with dread. It’s also a question my three-year-old daughter asked me recently, despite having spent the last three years actively showing her that girls can be and do anything.
But can they?
If you were to answer this question based on an examination of the children’s bookshelves at your local library, then you would be asking the same question as my daughter.
Story after story, male characters are overwhelmingly portrayed as adventurous, smart or funny and girls as passive, insecure or fulfilling a stereotypical female role like parenting, cleaning, or shopping.
Story after story, male characters are overwhelmingly portrayed as adventurous, smart or funny and girls as passive, insecure or fulfilling a stereotypical female role like parenting, cleaning, or shopping.
This gender bias in children's books has been widely reported, revealing that lead characters are 50 per cent more likely to be male than female, with female characters often relegated to a less-interesting ‘sidekick' role.
And research conducted in the 1970s tells us that children formulate so many of their beliefs from the picture books read to them when they’re very young. From what they can be when they grow up, to gender roles: the images they see reflected on the page as children shape their adult dreams and ambitions.
It’s easy to comprehend why the current gender gap in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) might exist. If male characters get the spotlight in books, then it’s not difficult to correlate this with the fact that men make up 84 per cent of the STEM workforce in Australia.
From decreasing the tertiary entrance requirements for female STEM students to quotas and grants, governments and corporations are throwing a lot of time and money at fixing this complex problem.
STEM skills play a crucial role in innovation, which is a key driver of economic growth and GDP. If only half the population contributes their skills and knowledge then we’re nowhere near reaching our economic, social or environmental potential as a society.
Initiatives like the recently launched, government-funded Girls in STEM Toolkit are no doubt going to inspire older school-aged girls and provide teachers and parents with resources that support an interest in STEM.
But it’s a case of too little, too late. Girls need strong STEM role models when they’re in pre-school, not approaching their teens.
But it’s a case of too little, too late. Girls need strong STEM role models when they’re in pre-school, not approaching their teens.
Girls start to lose interest in STEM subjects at school by the age of 15. If we’re to get more girls studying STEM and into secure, well-paying jobs of the future we need to inspire them as three and four-year-olds through characters in books. Reading interesting stories about scientists, doctors, and mathematicians that happen to also be women must be a part of the solution.
Thankfully, there is an increasing number of authors addressing this imbalance and providing our daughters (and sons - they need to see women and girls as strong and capable of anything too) with much-needed role models. Books like The Girls, Pearl Power and Ada Twist, Scientist are giving girls a wider range of examples of what it is to be female, but this is not the norm. The hours and dollars I’ve spent sourcing empowering books for my daughter attest to this fact.
Raising an empowered girl is one of my most important priorities in life, yet it’s clear that she isn’t even immune to social conditioning.
I change gender pronouns in books to ’she’, make up stories about brave, courageous girls, and talk to her about all of her successful, ambitious ‘aunties’ who are smashing the glass ceiling in their chosen careers, but gender stereotypes engulf us.
She already - despite my protests - believes any item of blue clothing in the house automatically belongs to her brother, so it’s not far-fetched for her to conclude that some careers will be out of her reach too.
Raising an empowered girl is one of my most important priorities in life, yet it’s clear that she isn’t even immune to social conditioning.
Right now she might prefer dinosaurs and lizards to princes and princesses, but I fear she will take on the belief that her destiny is dictated by gender, while her male peers by ambition.
So how did I end up answering my daughter’s question? With a book, of course.
Joan Proctor Dragon Doctor was a zoologist and the first female curator of reptiles at the London Zoo. And now she’s also my daughter's idol.
If girls can’t be what they can’t see, then we need to go all-out in giving them the role models they - and we as a society – desperately need.
Seeing first-hand the effect one picture book about a female scientist has had on my daughter's interests and beliefs I’m hopeful that we can close the gender gap in STEM.
Book by book, character by character, we can all smash a little piece of the glass ceiling together.
