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Boosting female participation in STEM fields [La Rochelle, France]
Communauté d agglomération de La Rochelle © Genderedlandscape (2022)
La Rochelle Urban Community, a partner city from URBACT GenderedLandscape Action Planning Network, is tackling gender inequity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields through a number of planned actions. In the Urban Community, 51.5% of total job seekers are women and women are overrepresented among older, long-term and highly qualified job seekers. Noticing labour
market segregation in scientific and technical fields and associated higher rates of unemployment among skilled women, the Urban Community of La Rochelle looked at training and education data to learn more about potential causes for this phenomenon. At the University of La Rochelle, where women represent 59% of the student population, strong gender imbalances are already apparent at the Bachelor s degree level. For example, women represent only 13% to 28% of the student body in fields such as computer science, civil engineering, physics or chemistry, but 69-70% of the study population in fields such as health, earth and life sciences, literature and languages, and law. These trends begin already in La Rochelle s high schools, where young women make up only 22% of students in tertiary training programmes, compared with 43% in France as a whole. The Urban Community concluded that the absence of women in STEM professions can be tackled through a gendered perspective toward high school and higher education. To reach this vision, a number of actions are planned along two axes: increasing the number of girls and women in STEM fields in secondary and high schools; and women s employment in the technical, scientific, digital and industrial sectors.
Actions on the first axis include a webinar on jobs provided by the La Rochelle Commercial Port (with a gender lens), the Passerelle Forum 2023 (annual student orientation forum) and a Hackathon for gender equality on career choices. For the Hackathon, which took place on 11 March 2022, 13- to 14-year-old teenagers were encouraged to reflect on their career choices and the role that gender plays. They were then invited to think of concrete actions that could promote labour market integration. For axis two, a one-stop shop for women at the local branch of the Employment Agency and so-called economic assets days that enable residents, employees, job seekers, and students to visit local companies to learn about jobs, training and employment opportunities are planned.
[ CALL TO ACTION ] Are you interested to learn more about educational tools to integrate gender into other topics and disciplines? Read the book series Teaching with gender by the ATGENDER, the European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation.
Case Study
