Abstract:

The gender mainstreaming has been attracting more and more attention due to its social implications. The field of education is of course one of the areas in which policies are taken into account and implemented to avoid imbalance. In particular, in higher education several studies have been conducted and initiatives are being developed to introduce a gender perspective in teaching.

One of the issues raised is the low percentage of girls in STEM careers, especially in engineering in general, which obviously results in even lower proportions in career opportunities when those related to teaching are excluded. This percentage places them as a minority, often extreme.

However, few studies are known that have delved into how minority sentiment influences learning conditions and development. In this sense, the paper “STEM students’ perception of gender maintreaming in teaching: the development of a measuring tools” (M. Alsina et al, Proceedings of ICERI2019) made some contributions.

This work is based on experiences at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC) arising from the pandemic situation for covid, which forced to change face-to-face to remote learning. Situations analyzed from a gender perspective reproduce patterns that could be considered characteristic of experiences of ethnic minorities, for example, or diversity due to physical disabilities, and so on. Pattern identification suggests the desirability of promoting actions to value diversity that contribute to a more inclusive and equitable education.

Experiences show certain diversity and minorities fading in remote learning. Therefore, positive points of online teaching are identified and some proposals are made in order they can be integrated into future teaching models.

Keywords:

Gender mainstreaming, minority issues, remote learning.