R&D Projects
An analysis of the factors that influence women and girls to pursue physics and mathematics
Principal Investigator
- YOKOYAMA Hiromi M
Professor, Kavli IPMU, The University of Tokyo
Objective
As a core project of science and technology innovation policy, girls' students have been supporting to advance in science departments. However, the proportion of female students in mathematics and physics department is overwhelmingly lower than that of biological systems, less than 10%. In other countries, there are more than half of girls students in mathematics, physics department. In Japan where mathematical performance is good worldwide, the reason is considered to be some social factors.
In this research, we analyze the social factors about the reason.
Outline
Research is conducted in three stages. In the first stage, in order to extract social factors surrounding female students, we conduct group interviews with numerous female researchers and survey the Internet to parents who have daughters. Factors are extracted from these results, and we will construct a model.
In the second stage, we will conduct a large scale survey on women science students to validate the model. Furthermore, as a third step, we will conduct surveys in countries with a high rate of women's advancement in mathematics and physics, such as Italy. Finally, we will compare these results and we will clarify the reason unique to Japan.
