Abstract:

Although there are more women than men studying in Spanish universities, there is still a clear gender gap in terms of the degrees chosen by women. Thus, technological careers remain a minority choice for women. In fact, the percentage of women enrolled in the branch of Engineering and Architecture is very small. There is even research showing that, in countries with greater gender equality, this gap instead of narrowing, is widening. This situation could perhaps be explained by the existence of female and male stereotypes, which means that women do not usually choose technical degrees or technical professions. The degrees in communication are not alien to horizontal segregation, although this time they talk about their "feminization." Given this situation, it seems relevant to consider whether students have problems to pass the most technological subjects in communication degrees. In this way, the main objective of this work is to find out if there are differences depending on the sex of the students to overcome technical subjects in the communication degrees. For this, the present paper proposes to carry out a comparative analysis, with a gender perspective, of the results obtained by the students who study communication degrees at the Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM) in the subject Technology I, taught in the first course of the Degree in Advertising and Public Relations, the Degree in Audiovisual Communication and the Degree in Journalism.

The main results of this work seem to indicate that there are no differences in the marks obtained by the students according to their gender. However, it is possible to observe statistically significant dissimilarities by degrees, so that students who attend the Degree in Audiovisual Communication pass the subject more frequently and obtain better grades than the students of the Degree in Journalism and the Degree in Advertising and Public Relations. Therefore, it could be concluded that, for the sample analyzed, sex does not seem to be a decisive variable to overcome technical subjects in communication studies, it seems rather a matter of tastes and preferences.

Keywords:

Gender, communication, degrees, technical subjects.