Education

Women in STEM and School Education

A proverb that has been around for half a century can also be a barrier to girls exploring STEM subjects!

In the questionnaire of our project, we found that women tend to be more concerned about skin problems, so in our subsequent surveys and interviews, we focused on women in our in-depth investigation. In the process, many people were curious about our iGEM competition. They are curious about what we are doing, some of the elders exclaimed," Wow, girls can also study STEM subjects, how awesome."This statement made us very interested, Therefore, further research was conducted on the labeling of female subjects. We found that the saying " girls are more suitable for liberal arts, not STEM subjects" is widely known, from our grandparents even to high school students in international schools. In China, a certain academic bias may have been limiting girls from exploring their potential in STEM subjects study.

Appalling information we got from the questionnaire

In order to further understand this phenomenon, BS-United-China developed a questionnaire to conduct in-depth research on the discovered phenomenon. The survey results show:

Overturn this bias with us

We gathered the curiosity of our team members as well as the students around us about this topic and formulated the following questions:

1. Are women underrepresented in your industry?

2. Why do you think female underrepresentation in the industry exists?

3. In STEM areas, will female identity cause disadvantages?

In Through these questions, we found the researchers' responses positively to women's development in science. Even they met some barriers in front of their way of exploration, they confidently got through these issues and attained success. This made us realize that there are unlimited possibilities for women in STEM fields, and there are many successful scientists, teachers, and workers who excel in these fields. Nonetheless,there is a real lack of confidence in women's explorations in STEM fields due to societal traditions and prejudices. We intended to make this interview into a video, hoping that through the successful women's cases that we interviewed and their experience sharing, we may boost the confidence of more girls who are interested in STEM subjects!

However only BS-United-China as a propagandist, the influence was very limited. So, we decided to cooperate with more teams.

We need to help more girls tear down the label of academic bias

In order to reawaken girls’ subject confidence, we decided to jointly organize “Women in STEM“ themed activity with DUT_China , AIS-China, Shanghai-MedX, RDFZ-CHINA and ZJFH-Nanjing , and build a female motivation and sharing educational resource platform after the activity. There were six topic were shared , with the maximum number of participants in the meeting room reaching 103 .

After the meeting, we distributed lecture feedback questionnaires to the participants and collected 52 valid questionnaires. From these feedbacks, we found that:

Topic teams shared:

1.BS-United-China
"Girls can't learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well? Tear off the label theme of subject prejudice "
2. DUT-China
"Don't extinguish the love for STEM because of gender "
3.AIS-China
"From Hair to Scalp:The Secret of Male and Female Hair Loss, Attitude Differences and Social Dilemma Exposed "
4.Shanghai-MedX
"Colorectal Cancer Drug Screening System, and Female Scientists in the Cancer World "
5.RDFZ-CHINA
"Don't Let Acne affects women's self-confidence and leads to appearance anxiety . "
6.ZJFH-Nanjing
" Sweet through the sugar control period . What did those female scientists do?"

Set up the sharing platform

The resources sharing platform was successfully established. After the keynote lecture, BS-United-China , DUT_China , AIS-China, Shanghai-MedX, RDFZ-CHINA and ZJFH-Nanjing integrated the data, reading materials, literature, PPT , videos and other materials collected by their respective teams through emails that are beneficial to breaking gender bias in the discipline, and shared the presentations and verbatim drafts of their respective teams in the lecture. These materials were uploaded to the cloud disk and form the sharing platform. Teams can extract the necessary materials from each other and conduct various forms of lectures , Exhibitions and events in communities and school clubs.

High School Education

Due to the success in our online “Women in STEM” meeting and the construction of our cloud disk with five other iGEM teams, materials with regard to promoting the participation of women in synthetic biology were gathered. Combining the information with the design of BS-United-China on a new method of predicting and preventing acnes, the team decided to share the knowledge we have on this topic, or more specifically in the detection of acnes, with teenagers in two high schools, Shanghai Cao Yang NO.2 High School and Shanghai Guanghua University Cambridge International Center.

As all members of our team are high school students in which our classmates have shown great interest in what we are doing in this competition, and our project this year is targeting adolescences troubled by acnes, we truly recognize the importance of presenting some of our discoveries to high school students, so as to raise awareness of the issues related to acnes and how it could be prevented before being noticed, as well as to stimulate their interest in synthetic biology by sharing the papers and Outstanding Women in the biomedical field from our sharing platform and encourage more people to participate in similar investigations as what we are doing.

Our presentation is based on 3 main areas. For the participants to understand its purpose and goal, the first part of it is to introduce the iGEM competition where we submit our results to and the significance of the acne problem inducing both physical and psychological discomfort. Then, we dive deeper into the details of how traditional methods such as PCR anticipate and detect acnes, so students can gain a basic understanding of what the current acne detection methods are and how they can be improved. The last and most important part of the presentation is to give an overview of how, by utilizing the RCA technique, our newly developed BS test kit and BS cleanser can serve as a more efficient method of acne prevention.

In order to make sure that the areas covered in the presentations are beneficial to the target audiences and have actually drawn their attention to either the synthetic biology field or issues related to acne prevention, we designed a questionnaire for the participants to provide feedback for the team.

We received a total of 22 sets of feedback from the participants of our presentation. According to Figure 5, the area our audience is most interested in is the “current methods for acne prediction and prevention”. The second most impressive part of our presentation said by participants is our newly designed acne detection method this year. This result showcases the effectiveness of our presentation in drawing our target audiences’ attention to the problem with regards to acnes and the techniques involved in methods preventing it.

Moreover, the participants were also asked whether the presentation sparked their interest in some of the areas related. A large number of the respondents, 36.36% of them, answered that they would like to know more about what synthetic biology can do, which proves our sharing of associated knowledge are actually attracting people to join in this process of scientific investigation. Besides, 27.27% of participants are interested in seeing the details of our newly designed method for acne prevention and prediction, as well as 22.73% are willing to know how to participate in iGEM competition. We are delighted to see such results as it indicates the success of this activity in sparking the interest of more teenagers in using synthetic biology to solve real-life problems such as acnes, just as what we are doing. It is such a pleasure for the team to use this opportunity to educate high school students about our area of interest and successfully make more people want to join the synthetic biology community.