I'm really chuffed - as we say in Yorkshire - to introduce this guest post from Amy
Buchanan-Hughes, founder of The African Science Truck Experience (TASTE). TASTE runs a mobile science laboratory in rural Uganda so
that students in underprivileged secondary schools can get a hands-on
experience of science.
According to an earlier post on this blog, TASTE’s copy of the ScienceGrrl calendar is in the “most
intriguing” location worldwide. Following the calendar’s first
Official Engagement in the field this Friday, I thought ScienceGrrl’s fans would be interested to hear about how it has been
inspiring Ugandan girls to think beyond their usual narrow horizons.
Uganda is a difficult place to be a woman. One day, I asked to borrow a bike to go from my village to the nearby town. I was met with awkward surprise from my friends. “But Madam Amy… if a girl rides a bicycle, she can lose her virginity, and then nobody will marry her.” The outrage that this stirred in me made me even more determined than usual to fight against the gender stereotypes!
Dr Elizabeth
Kyewalabye inspires girls to follow in her footsteps
First, I should explain why we were so keen to encourage the girls to pursue science in particular. While doing research for TASTE, I was particularly interested in local perceptions of gender and of how it affects scientific ability. I was not exactly thrilled by the results. For example, a comment on a major Ugandan news website says “Boys have more chances of studying by revising their notice [notes] while girls have less time due to their Nature. When girls are washing boys are studying and when boys are reading again girls are cooking… This cannot be changed because it is a Natural order.” Also, when I asked the head teacher of a local mixed-sex school why few girls study sciences, he replied that “Pretty girls spend all their time with boys instead of studying, so they only have time to do easy subjects like arts. Science subjects are harder so only ugly girls can do science subjects.” Charming.
With these attitudes commonly accepted
as truth, girls quickly lose confidence about their ability in the
sciences, and their performance slips. We teach from Senior 1 (the
equivalent of year 7 or 8 in the UK) to Senior 4 (when students sit
their O-level exams), and in all of the thirteen schools we currently
work with, I have seen the same story: in Senior 1, the girls
dominate the science lessons, answering and asking questions
enthusiastically, and taking the lead in small group work. By Senior
4, however, they are quiet and reserved, allowing the boys to take
over, and suddenly discovering something very interesting on their
desk when they are asked a question.
During our Women’s Day seminars, we
used our own experiences to tell the girls that their gender should
never put them off studying sciences and choosing science careers. We
then focused on introducing career paths that most students have
never heard of. Students here aspire to be doctors, nurses or
engineers, because they have heard that these careers are well paid
and respected. These are all great jobs and, indeed, they are very
much needed in Uganda. But there is a whole wealth of other careers
that these young people could and should be aiming towards, that they
simply have no awareness of.
Students are
told to aim for good jobs, but there is usually little or no career
advice provided by their schools
A lot of the problem lies with the
local teachers, many of whom rarely venture beyond their own town. On
the first page of students’ exercise books in Senior 1, I found the
opening question of “Why do we study Physics?” The answers,
dictated by teachers, were typically listed as: “To pass exams. To
understand physics. To get jobs as engineers.”
However, the real horizons are wider
than they can possibly imagine. In 2011, the Ministry of Education in
Uganda published a list of the eight most marketable career fields in
Uganda for the near future:
- Health and medical services
- Biotechnology
- Agriculture, forestry and natural resources
- Information Communication Technology (ICT) Applications
- Fisheries and aquaculture
- Environment
- Energy – solar/wind
- Manufacturing and process engineering
Reading down this list, I noticed one
thing that they all have in common: unsurprisingly, they all rely
heavily on sciences. TASTE’s mantra in lessons is to “Illustrate,
instruct and inspire”, and the seminars gave us a great opportunity
to do the “inspire” part, by showing the girls how a background
in science could lead to them doing jobs that could improve not only
their own lives, but their whole country, and even the planet.
Up until this point in the seminars,
the girls were paying attention carefully, but they were very
serious. However, when we brought out the ScienceGrrl calendar,
their faces lit up.
Sometimes language is a barrier, and
culture even more so, but each picture spoke a thousand words.
Suddenly, our words became reality, as we told the girls about each
woman in each picture: “This lady tries to make artificial bones
out of chemicals because she thinks we could use them as building
materials someday” – cool!
“This lady is finding ways of using sunlight to make energy, without polluting the environment” – how useful that would be for Uganda, which currently relies almost exclusively on hydroelectric power. And how about “This lady just loves science so much that she writes songs about it!” – that got the loudest laugh of the day.
After showing them all the pictures, we
passed the calendars around, and suddenly we couldn’t keep order as
the girls crowded around trying to find out more.
For the hundreds of girls we teach, there was no better way for us to communicate ‘YES YOU CAN’ than by showing them these real examples of real women scientists. In the end, we literally had to drag the calendars away to move to the next school, promising as we left that we would bring the calendars back for the girls to read at another time. My hope is that reading the biographies will fire their curiosity, and that in a few years to come some of these girls might even feature in a Ugandan version of the calendar!
Hi! I just stumbled upon this blog at I'm really intrigued. I'm a female scientist and would love to get involved in this movement! I'd be happy to discuss this further. How do i get in touch?
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