女性の社会進出 ー STEM

記事の引用からお読み下さい。


Kids' drawings show how their views on gender and STEM have changed

Imagine asking a classroom full of elementary school students to draw a scientist. Now try to guess how many of them would sketch a female or male scientist.

In the decade that spanned 1966 to 1977, teachers across the country gave 4,800 elementary school students this exact task in what became known as the Draw-A-Scientist study. Then a researcher named David Wade Chambers analyzed the drawings. What he found, in 1983, might not surprise you: Only 28 of the children drew a female scientist — and those students were all girls. That amounted to less than one percent of all students.

Rest assured that as times have changed, so have kids' gender stereotypes. A new study published in Child Development Tuesday analyzed dozens of Draw-A-Scientist studies conducted since Chambers' landmark experiment and found that, on average, 28 percent of participants drew a female scientist in the subsequent studies.
(Rebecca Ruiz. Kids are drawing more female scientists than ever before. Mashable. March 20, 2018.)


教育現場での実験に、”Draw-A-Scientist“（科学者を描かせる）というものがあるそうです。四半世紀程昔の結果では、殆どの子供が科学者を男性として描いたのに対して、近年では女性として描く子供の割合が増加しているということです。

つまりは、女性の社会進出が進み、性別に対するステレオタイプが変化しているのです。

記事のタイトルに、”STEM”という略語が使われているのですが、最初は何のことか分かりませんでした。

ネットで検索した結果分かったのは、“STEM”というのは、


science, technology, engineering, and mathematics


の頭文字を取ったものだということです。


The fact that, on average, more than a quarter of students participating in a Draw-A-Scientist study depicted a woman over the past three decades is heartening progress yet still nowhere close to parity, she says. Indeed, while women have made considerable gains in some STEM fields, they remain drastically underrepresented in others, like physics, engineering, and computer science.
(ibid)


引用した記事ではこの略語を展開形で示すことなく、当たり前のように使っているのですが、他の用例では初出時に示しているものも見られます。