Abstract:

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), only 20% of 15-year-old girls are inclined to track studies in technical professions. In Spain, this percentage is reduced to 7%. This fact is subsequently reflected in the choice of university studies. Although female students obtain more than 50% of university degrees, their presence in careers such as Physics or Engineering hardly reaches 30%. The worst thing is that as you move up in the university hierarchy the number of women falls. Thus, less than 40% of professors and less than 21% of full professors are women.

The problem lies in the perpetuation of male and female roles in the current society that continue to maintain this situation of disproportion. To mitigate this disproportion, the United Nations declared February 11 as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science with the main goal of achieving full and equal access and participation of women in science than men. In our country, a group of researchers and scientific communicators launched the initiative “Iniciativa 11 de Febrero”, a call to organize activities to join this celebration and make visible the role of women in science. Within this initiative, the University of Vigo in the Ourense campus organized a scientific fair in which researchers and technologists (women) show their investigations to high school students.

In the particular case of the “Ephyslab” group, its participation deals with the study of the climate change. The name of the stand was “Solving the climate puzzle” and the climate change subject was approached from different points of view. In this sense, the different meteorological instruments used to measure the climate were explained in a visual and manipulative way; the effect of global warming on sea level rise was showed and students learnt how to make a cloud using simple materials and the physical principle that lies behind it. Finally, the phenomenon of El Niño was simulated in a simple and illustrative way telling the students its consequences on local and global weather.

Keywords:

Women in science, scientific fair, high school students, manipulative way.