 Asher, as a review speaker for this evening, she will speak on supporting equity and inclusion in STEM. I'm not reading out the abstract, which I'm sure most of you have read it. I'll just read out her biography. Louise is the Karl Mannhin Professor of Sociology of Education at UCL UK, her research focuses on educational identities and inequalities, particularly in relation to participation in STEM across primary, secondary, and higher education, and in informal STEM learning settings. She has directed numerous large research studies focused on understanding inequalities in STEM participation and has authored over 100 articles, books, and chapters. She's particularly interested in co-design work with teachers and educational practices and was awarded prizes for the impact of her work in 2019 and 2020. So, Louise will address us for 45 minutes, then we will take questions from you, looking forward to a very active session. Louise, thank you very much, Shashree. That's very kind. So I'm just trying to share my screen, so hopefully that won't work. There we go. Right, so yes, it's a pleasure to come and talk about our research with you. And as you can see from the title, we're particularly interested in these ideas of how do we support equity and inclusion in STEM. So, as I'm sure you all know, we're working in this policy context where there's a lot of concern about the rates of participation. So are enough young people studying STEM and for long enough and are they diverse enough as well? So particularly in contexts like ours in the UK. So we've had a lot of time and resource invested in trying to solve this problem over time. I'd say particularly in the UK, there have been gains, but overall not massive changes in our participation rates. And when we look at who studies them in the UK, it's still very narrow, very privileged, particularly in subjects like physics and engineering. And this is repeated in a number of other international contexts as well. Like everywhere, we've seen that existing inequalities have been exacerbated and made worse by the COVID pandemic. So when we've looked at the sorts of interventions that we see in schools and out of school settings, we see that a lot of the work that gets done tends to focus on trying to make science or STEM more fun or more interesting with the idea that if young people are just more interested in it, surely they'll just go on and study it more. But our research suggests that a lack of interest is not the main problem. So I'm going to talk a bit about our aspires research. So since 2009, our aspires project has tracked a cohort of young people from age 10 in primary school up to age 23. So currently this year, our cohort are about age 22. So it's a mixed method study. We do large scale surveys. So we've surveyed over 48,000 young people so far as part of this. And we also do in depth, longitudinal interviews. So we've got 50 young people and their parents who we've managed to keep in the study and interview every couple of years from age 10 to 22. So we've conducted hundreds, around 800 interviews there. So this together gives us hopefully this nice picture of breadth and depth to try and understand. What is it that makes a difference to a young person's trajectory? What makes one young person go into STEM or science and not enough? So you can just see a little breakdown there of the different phases. So from phase one and with age 10, 11 is year six in our system, which is the last year of primary. You can see that we pick them up through secondary and then out the other side. And the most recent phase was when many of them were in higher education, but a lot had also gone into jobs. Some had become parents and so on. So when we look at our survey data, we get this picture where most young people actually report liking science. But this doesn't translate into them seeing it as something that they could be in the future. So for example, getting a job in science or being a scientist. So just looking at some of our example survey items, we see here that on the whole, most young people were telling us that they learned, for example, interesting things in science. So this first set of bars here, so this first blue one, age 10, over 70 percent are saying they are learning interesting things in science at school. It's still quite high in early secondary with the red one here. And even the purple one, which in England is age 15, 16, which is our big national exams year. And to be honest, it's really hard to keep anything interesting at that time because it's very much teaching for the exams. Even then, nearly 60 percent of young people are saying they're finding science at school interesting. This grayed out bar here, the last one, is just those students who choose to continue with science when it's no longer compulsory. So unsurprisingly, that is nice and high. But overall, we're seeing there's something that teachers are doing right because science is interesting for most of the young people. It's not that they're finding it boring. This second group of bars here is exemplifying parental and family valuing of science. So we wondered, maybe their families don't think it's important for them to learn science. But actually, these bars are telling us that the vast majority are saying that their parents think it's really important for them to learn science. You can see here over 70 percent, apart from when science is no longer compulsory and it drops off quite sharply. So there are discussions in England at the moment around should we continue with our current system? We have a very specialised system. We get children to specialise very early at school. And so there are debates around, you know, maybe we should get more children to continue with more subjects for longer. But I'd be really interested to hear what's usual in the Indian system as well. It's also not that the majority of young people had really negative views of scientists. So again, here, this third set of columns, we can see that it's over 70 percent. I mean, really high of young people saying, you know, for example, agreeing that scientists do valuable work. Many of them also thought that scientists earn a lot of money, which is not something that all scientists agree with. But again, this is a general picture of positive perceptions. So all of these positive views we thought might translate into lots of young people thinking they want to continue with science in the future. But actually, we can see here down the bottom, this last set of columns shows that all these positive views don't necessarily translate into that. So this last set here seems to vary a little bit in the numbers, but statistically, it's the same. So statistically, there's no difference in the proportion of young people agreeing at age 10 that they'd like to be a scientist compared to the proportion at age 17, 18. And we call this the being, doing, divide. But yet the children seem to like doing science. They just don't see it as something they can want to be in the future. So we're interested in what creates this gap between the two. And we were also interested to see that when we looked at the profile of who was agreeing that they'd like to be a scientist, although we could see some kind of gendered patterns, for example, at the start, these got more pronounced over time. So over time, the proportion who was saying they'd like to be a scientist was more likely to become more affluent boys, for example. So we're interested in what is it that's giving these messages and creating these patterns. So just to put those aspirations for wanting to be a scientist in context, we this is just from age 15, 16 students, but their pattern is very similar at most of the ages. So we can see the most popular aspiration here is for business and scientist is right down over the end here. Slightly depressingly, celebrity is here, bar four. So we're interested in what makes scientists feel less attractive than, for example, business. Now, in one sense, we do have to take this with a little bit of caution because business can mean lots and lots of very different things. It can mean being the boss of a huge international company. It could mean having your own very small, little local business. But we were interested because also when we look at the profile of those aspiring to these different areas, as I said, those aspiring to science and particularly to engineering work, particularly engineering with overwhelmingly male students. But when we look at business, it was the most mixed. It was the most gender, ethnic and social class balanced. So there is something about business that feels open, that feels that young people can imagine themselves into it in a way that many can't or don't feel that with science, despite finding it interesting. So when we looked across all of our qualitative and quantitative data, we mapped out some of the key factors that we found were influencing these patterns of aspiration and participation, what young people ended up going into. And this slightly ugly diagram really tells us it is complex. There is no one thing. We found all of these different factors that were interrelated, all made a difference, all combined together to affect this, the science identity and aspiration of a young person. So the likelihood that a young person would feel, yes, science is for me, it's something I want to go into in the future. So I'm going to talk through some of these areas, but just to flag that they do all interconnect. And there's a link to our report that sets it all out in detail, if you're interested. So the first area, the kind of bluey colour, were factors related to what we call capital. So we use the idea in the project of science capital. And really, this is just a concept, a way of holding together all the different forms of science related resource that you have in your life. And we found that the more a young person's science capital is valued in there, particularly in their educational setting, the more likely they are to aspire to and to participate in science after the age of 16 and to have a science identity. So by that, we mean to see themselves and to be seen by others as a scientific person. So schools and other educational settings made a big difference to what and whether a young person's science capital got recognised and then leveraged and valued support to support their science trajectory or not. So when you think about science capital, we sometimes use the analogy of the bag or the holder, as you can see from the picture, with the idea that it contains all your science related stuff that you have. And if you use the bag image, you can think of science capital comprising four main areas or pockets if you work without medical. So the first statistically, when we map them out, the first area is a person's science literacy, so what you know. So they're sort of science knowledge and understanding and so on. The second area is their science related attitudes and values. So how they think about science. So do you see sciences everywhere in the world? Do you see it as relevant to your life and so on? The third area is about out of school science behaviours. So basically what what young people do in their spare time? So do they look at science websites? Do they read science magazines or books? Go to a science centre, talk with someone at home about science and so on. And the fourth area, science at home is who they know out of school, particularly. So is there someone at home who talks to them about science, who encourages them to do it, who maybe has science qualifications or a background or a job in science themselves? And I'm surprisingly, the more you have of these forms of capital, statistically, the more likely you are to go into science in the future. And we also did some analyses to look at whether science relates to STEM as well. And we found that science capital is particularly strongly value predictive of participation in physics, but also engineering. It's related to maths and computing, but not not quite as strong. So when we talk about science capital, we're really using the phrase in a sociological way. We particularly draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who was a French sociologist picture there, and his ideas of habitus, capital and field. Now Bourdieu wasn't really interested in science, particularly he was more interested in the arts and so on. But his ideas, I think, have relevance. And so we've tried to bring them across, borrow them and use them. So Bourdieu proposed that you can understand these kind of patterns of reproduction in social life through the interaction of what he calls habitus, capital and field. So for Bourdieu, habitus refers to socialised in body dispositions that shape whether science feels for me or not. These are gendered, classed, racialised and so on. It gives you what's called a feel for the game, that kind of internal sense of what's normal for people like me. This interacts with capital, which can take different forms. So they're cultural capital, social capital, economic, symbolic and so on. And these are the resources that you have and accrue, a bit like the hand that you might have to play in the game. And all of this takes place within the context of the field. The field is more than just context. I find it a really useful concept because it really brings in notions of power. Bourdieu talks about a field as a space of positions and position taking, and it sets the rules of the game. So we can think of the field at different scales. There can be the field of education, the field of science, but there can also be the field of the science classroom. So what gets valued, who gets valued? And that can make a real difference to someone's habitus and capital. So Bourdieu says it's the extent of the fit between your habitus, capital and the field that you are in that shapes whether or not you feel that a particular thing in our case, science is for you or not, whether you experience that field like he calls a fish in water, whether it feels easy or whether you feel the weight of the water on you. So we were interested in how particular families, different forms of science capital made young people feel more that science is for me or not, and it produced these different trajectories. So just to give you a little sense from some of our qualitative data, the top two quotes are from families with, let's say, very high levels of science capital. So there's a mum there saying, well, talking about how the other day in the car, we were laughing about chemical symbols and things. So I guess it comes into our discussions quite subliminally, really. Now, many of you may regularly laugh about chemical symbols in the car or wherever you happen to be with other people. But in our study, this wasn't that common. It was really among these very, very sciencey families. And you'll be unsurprised to know that that mother has a background in chemistry. She has a chemistry degree and works in a chemistry related job. The second quotes from a young woman called Davina. And she said, well, science is just where it's at in my family. And she talked about how her and her family members would sit around the dining table wearing their science t-shirts, talking about what they've read in science magazines like New Scientist and so on. So for these families, science wasn't just a school subject that you do. It was part of who we are, part of the identity, part of the fabric of daily family life. And unsurprisingly, the mother, who gives a quote there, her daughter has gone into a STEM related area and Davina is just finishing off the last year of a chemistry degree. But they were the minority. They were generally about five percent of families in our sample to have these high levels of science capital. More common were the quotes, the bottom two quotes. So the mum saying, hmm, I suppose in everyday life, you just don't get that much to do with science. So for this mother, like many young people and families in the study, science felt distant. It felt alien. It wasn't this part of the everyday life and identity and family fabric. It felt abstract and distant from them. They didn't see it with the science families, which literally see science everywhere in the echoes of your voice, in the electricity, powering your computer, everything. And as Jack, the quote there says, you know, his family, no, they never talk about science. So as I said, science capital, the more like the two families that in the first two quotes, these high levels of science capital, the young people from those families were statistically more likely to aspire to and progress into STEM after the age of 16. So you can see there from our longitudinal sample, 80 percent of those who never aspired to STEM or science had low science capital, 83 percent of those who carried on after the age of 18 had a very high science capital. And as I said, it's a reasonable proxy for STEM capital. And we can see that, particularly with physics, we're nearly eight times more likely to go to physics if you have high science capital and just over three times more likely in engineering. So that thinking back to that diagram, that's the sort of first bluey bucket. We then have this kind of these kind of greeny areas at the bottom, which are about representations of science and STEM. Particularly in our research, it's representations of these as clever and as aligned with masculinity. So over time, young people had this pervasive reinforcement of if you study science or STEM, it's really hard and it's only for really clever people. As we've written out about before, notions of cleverness, we see as highly gendered, classed and racialized. So they're very much aligned with white middle class masculinity as epitomized there by the character Sheldon, the physicist from the Big Bang Theory, the American comedy series. And even when other students attain highly, if they're not fitting the ideals of white middle class masculine cleverness, they can sometimes feel inauthentic or don't get recognized as authentic STEM people or science people and so on. So we were interested how these ideas emerge and develop over time. And there's just some quotes here from Victor, he's one of the young men in our study. He's actually just last year finished an astrophysics degree. But we've chosen him just because he said quite similar things to other people, but you can see the examples particularly clearly over time. So when we talk to him at age 10 in year six, he, like many other children, expressed this lovely view you don't have to be clever to do science. You just have to really like it or try your best or be really interested. So sort of nice, open, meritocratic ideals. By the time you got to year eight in early secondary, he was saying, well, I think you have to be a little bit clever. You probably have to be quite clever. By year nine, you can see that solidifying more. So people who are keen on science, they're not average people. They're cleverer than most people. And by age 16, year 11, yes, you need to be clever to study science. So you can see the children aren't born thinking that science is associated with cleverness and masculinity. They learn it. We teach them this over time. And you can see that these views progress and solidify. Despite him, he changes school. He goes from primary to secondary. He has different teachers each year. He studies different curricula. But all the messages that he and the others are getting are that science is associated with cleverness. And so he comes to learn it. And by the age of 16, it's what would you would call it sort of docks, sort of a thing that you just take for granted. You don't even question it. That's just the way the world is. So those ideas exclude many young people who don't feel or don't get recognized as living up to them from science. And the third area that purpley ones are about the educational factors and practices that made a difference. So in our study in England, we found that most of the young people had quite patchy and patterned careers education. Arguably, those who could have benefited most from it received the least and the poorest quality. Those students who were the most privileged in our sample received the most extensive and holistic forms of career support. We also found strong effects of the ways that in England we really try very hard to stop a lot of young people from continuing a science. We set up all these hurdles and these structures and systems which are really unhelpful. So, for example, from about the age of 13, 14, young people in England tend to get divided onto what's called either a double science route or the prestigious triple science route. So the triple science route is seen as the main route for people who would continue with science after the age of 16. But it's not offered equally and it's not offered wide but fairly. So in some schools, if you're in a more affluent school, you may have the option for everyone to study it. But that's quite rare. Rather, often what happens in many schools is only the top attaining 30 children or so might get to study it. And in some schools, we found that it's not offered at all. So or some schools, children who take it have to do it as an afterschool additional class. So it's not an even chance of whether you can pursue a science route going forward. There's also a negative impact because for some reason in in England, we mark a level at advanced level age 18 exams. We mark physics and chemistry harder than other subjects, which means it's harder to get top grade, which means in turn schools restrict the entry of students onto those levels. And these practices in turn reinforce what we were talking about in the previous slide, the idea of sciences only for the clever, which then makes lots of children feel that, well, I don't live up to that. I'm not a genius, so it can't possibly be for me. So our concern here is that even if we made every child in the UK want to study science, we actually don't let the majority of them onto these routes that would make it easier for them to progress with it. We also found a depressing number of examples of ways in which these ideas get reproduced by teachers. So we were aware that young people were finding a learning from their teachers that getting these ideas that science, but particularly physics, is only for the select male, or brainly few. We talk about these in one of our papers as a sort of cultivation of these ideas of who continues with science and particularly physics and the weeding out of those who don't live up to it. So young people in our study told us about how their teachers would often reinforce the idea that this subject is difficult. So science teachers might be more likely to say, oh, this is a difficult subject. You might have you might struggle to understand it more so than in other non-site subjects. Young women also told us that their teachers said things like, well, you need a boy brain to study math or physics, or all my girls who take a level physics are tomboy. So sort of more do more masculine performances of identity. And this was even told to us by girls attending very prestigious science focused girls schools. So it was common, more common than we were expecting. We also found that boys and students with high cultural capital were the most likely to say that they received encouragement from their teachers to continue with science. So we think there are these forms of unconscious bias coming through. And over time, these forms of what Bordeaux would call pedagogic work produce this narrow range of future scientists who reproduce it were more likely to continue with these sort of stereotypes and ideas. And this was especially so in physics. So when we looked when we surveyed the sample at age 17, 18 and we looked at who the students were statistically the most likely to agree with statements such as scientists are odd, male or geeky, it was our A level physics students. So we see this as the way that physics cultivates this idea of that you have to be this sort of male genius to study the subject. Are the students who feel they don't live up to it, get weeded out? And the problem then is that if the students who are most likely to think these sort of stereotypical ideas of a physicist, physics students, they some of them will presumably be the physics teachers of the future. You may keep reinforcing these patterns. So there was a sort of irony in a way we found in some of the interventions in the UK, where a lot of effort is put in trying to convince non-science students that anyone can do science, that you don't have to be odd male and geeky. But our data was suggesting those other students aren't the ones who have the strongest stereotypes of that area. It's the physics students who are most likely to agree with that. So maybe the intervention work needs to happen more with them. So as I said, the analysis of the data showed that the physics students were statistically distinctive, both compared to other A level science students and compared to students in general. So they have this higher maths and science self-confidence. They are generally more pro science in their views. And as I said, they are much more likely to agree that scientists are odd male and geeky. Beyond this sort of notion of the physics habit, we also notice it is specifically gendered. So when we looked at the interview data, young men taking physics were much more likely to talk about themselves as being strong or good at the subject or quite good or talking about how they'd find it easy. And those who didn't continue with physics would tend to give external reasons for why they wouldn't continue with it. So it's because they liked something else more or the teachings and everything. The young women who took physics A level at age 17, 18, had to negotiate their femininity in relation to this idea of the physics being a masculine area. So they often felt that if they were putting in a lot of time and effort, that somehow that meant that they weren't clever enough, that they weren't being effortlessly clever. So they'd often talk about finding physics too hard and feeling that that must mean it's not for me. We only had one young woman in the interview, some who actually continued on to a physics degree. And that was Hannah, who I'll come back to in a moment. But the majority of girls who liked physics found that there are the other things stuck in them and feeling it could be for them. So there was a lot of self exclusion. So, for example, Kate took advanced level physics at age 18. When I interviewed her about what she was going to choose at university, she said, well, I think I've always liked physics, but always thought it was quite hard. So maybe not for me. So I wouldn't do a straight physics degree because it would be too hard. So I think I'm just a bit put off thinking it'd be really hard. So you can see very subtly there that maybe Kate thinks physics is a bit too hard. But when we look at Kate's attainment, Kate was the highest achieving student in our sample. She got the top grades, which were A stars across the board, including in physics. So she absolutely did have the attainment to do a physics degree. But you can see she feels it's not something not for her. She ends up going on to do a natural sciences degree and was considering taking a physics module on the degree. But the tutor at the start dissuaded her from this and told her it will be too hard. In the end, Kate's gone on and has specialised in plant science. And she's very happy in plant science. But you can see that it's not her attainment here. It's these messages the whole time that, you know, if not feeling clever enough and that impacts differentially beyond attainment on different students. So as I said, we did have one young woman who went on to study physics. How did she do that? Well, she had similar attainment to many of the other young women in the sample. We also took advanced level physics, but we didn't continue with it at university. She had good attainment, but it wasn't different from any others. She also experienced being the only girl in her physics class at A level. She didn't have views of physics that were different from anyone else. So as she says there, I guess physics has that connotation of manliness. So she had to manage that. But what she did have was a very physics related habitus in capital. So she was very interested in science. She was also the way she performed her gender identity. She's often talking about being proud to be different or a quote that says, I like surprising people. I like breaking boundaries. So she saw taking physics as a way of doing this and celebrating that of her celebrating a difference. She managed her femininity appearance and her and intellectually as well. And she also, which did set her apart from the other young women in the study. She had exceptionally high physics related capital. So she had direct family members who were physicists and particularly her brother was a physicist and he was also married to her sister-in-law, who was also a woman physicist. And so she had lots of physics capital. So Hannah said she would like to feel that she's good at physics. So even with all of this and being a physicist, she still has these little slight questions I'd like to feel, not I am good at physics. And she worries that she's maybe not authentic as a student because she doesn't breeze through. So that idea that the ideal physics student is effortlessly clever. And that is coming back to the idea of the male science genius. We also looked at social class in our study, as I said, we have these different routes and we found that the different routes that students take were very much classed in terms of who took them. And we found that students who are from working class backgrounds often struggled to be recognised as good physics students, even if they were attaining fine. So Danielle in our study is a white working class girl. She describes herself as very glamorous. She has wonderful hair, extensions, nail and makeup and so on. And she constantly talks about how she feels she's not seen as a proper physics student. So she talks about how when she went to a science fair where you learn about different careers, she was heading towards the science stand. And a woman came careering across the hall to her and said, you look like you'd like to do beauty, young lady. She comes from a family who've never been to university. She talks about how my family is not clever. No one's been there. So for her, she has a lot of things which combine to make her feel inauthentic. And she ends up not taking physics at advanced level and she ends up going off to study sociology, which for me is a win. So when we look at the working class students in ensemble who did become socially noble, who attained higher levels of education than their parents, we found that what we call a wraparound of resources and capital was important over time, across different contexts. And also they had luck. They had lucky access to particular forms of social and educational capital, which, while useful for them, is also slightly depressing as a policy message of how do we design for luck? In terms of race and ethnicity in our study, we found that black students had higher science aspirations and family support than white students. But this did not translate into participation. So this, for us, is about challenging common education policy narratives in the UK, which often assume that the reason black students aren't in science at high levels because they lack aspiration. Our data says it's not that at all. We see it as the role of racism and the intersection with class. We found that minority minority students in our sample often took more backdoor routes to get to where they wanted to with science degrees. And we also have a chapter written on an example of a case study of Vanessa, who's a young woman of a black African background, who had strong family support and valuing of science. And she had a love of science. She really liked it, wanted to go into it. But over time, this was eroded by her experiences through the education system. And at the end, as her and her father reflected when they were older, her love for it wasn't enough. Having an interest alone wasn't enough. It was all these other things that stopped her. So the result, we would say, is the systematic exclusion of students from science. So it wasn't that young people necessarily lacked interest or aspiration, but we have all of these different factors from societal discourses to educational gatekeeping to home and families factors that all combined together to make it really difficult for young people to continue and which mean that those who do continue in these particular pathways become cultivated in such a way that they're more likely to keep reproducing those inequalities in the future rather than challenging them. So things stay the same. So there's often an idea that a metaphor used of the science pipeline, the idea that, you know, people leak out at the pipeline at each stage. We would challenge this. Our data would suggest that young people don't passively leak out at the pipeline. They're formally and informally ejected through a range of injustices, more like a rigged bingo machine. So this is a clip from the US drama series, The Tickle Soul, and in it, it's all has a rigged bingo machine. So he has a mechanism worked up, which means that he knows which ball will come out. We say this is a bit more like the science process. There's a strong power of what broad vehicles symbolic violence, where the people who are most disadvantaged by this come to blame themselves. So I'm not clever enough or so on. And we'd say it's not random. It's socially patterned and it's self reproducing. So what can be done? We suggest that rather than trying to change young people, we need to change the structural and systemic barriers that prevent even these highly interested and well-attaining young people from continuing. This for us means rethinking common deficit and individualized discourses. And it means we're trying to change the field. So trying to change science education pedagogy, changing our business as usual, not the young people. I'm just going to briefly show you two tools that we've co-developed with teachers that can help with this in case you're interested in trying them out yourself. So one is called the Equity Compass and it helps support a social justice mindset. And the other is the science capital teaching approach. So the Equity Compass is a reflective tool. You can use it with worked up versions with teachers, with senior school leaders and governors, with science outreach practitioners, STEM ambassadors, all sorts of different versions. But basically, it helps orientate you to take a social justice approach in your practice or policy. Thank you, Joshua. Thank you. So it helps you think about how equitable your practice is. There are sets of reflective questions with each of the dimensions. There are four general areas and then eight sub-dimensions. And you can plot your progress. So near the center is less equitable. Moving outwards is where we want to go. So it helps you see progress if you're moving in the right direction. We've also got a handbook. We've got primary and secondary versions. This is just the primary one for a teaching approach that was co-developed with teachers, which is about how we put all of these ideas into practice. And you can see we've got a Hindi translation. We've got other languages as well. So again, based on these ideas of how do we change our practice to challenge all of these issues that are stopping young people from connecting with science and feeling that it's for me. So just a couple of ideas. If you're interested, you can apply the equity lens to your work. If you want to choose the equity compass, if you do ambassador and outreach work, we've also got a free short self-paced MOOC that you can learn how to use it. It's not too many hours, a few hours, but there's a link there. And if you're a teacher or work with teachers, maybe the idea is in the handbook. We've got various summaries, short films, little, what do you call it, animations and so on. So there's just some links there. We've got Hindi versions of the compass and of the handbook. All the links are there. You're very welcome to have the slides. And I shall stop there and welcome any questions and discussion. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Professor Gwee. It was, I mean, you've finished before time. Thank you so much. It was a very, very engaging presentation. Very, I mean, something that we can relate to. You know, India is a country of multitude of differences. We have regional linguistic class and class differences, gender, of course. And we are increasingly seeing gender as a non-binary thing, you know, at least amongst a tiny minority of people who engaged in science studies in India. So your presentation is of much value to us. I'm sure there are several questions from the audience. I hope they will, they are free to actually, feel free to turn the mic on and ask your question. Or if you want to put it in the chat also, we will read it. There is a long paragraph from Karen. What is the evidence that there is or is not a shortage of scientists? What is the relation between students' interest in science and the future job opportunities? If there is a job shortage, then are schools playing a valuable role in selecting two students for continuing in science and justifying rejection of the majority. If there is a job shortage, it is obvious in the present world that there will also be a gender, race, class bias. It isn't increasing good jobs, the best way to increase students is increasing, yeah? And the underprivileged to become scientists. Thank you, lots there. I'll try and unpick those in turn. Thank you, Karen. So is there a shortage of scientists or STEM professionals or not? Partly, I think it depends on your view. Lots and lots of governments and organisations, like particularly engineering organisations and professional societies, would all argue that there is currently a skills gap and they're projecting an even greater future one. So lots of people are very concerned that there is a shortage. I think the gap comes in that some analyses that I've read suggest that there's not actually a shortage of STEM graduates. It's just that we don't then translate all of them into STEM jobs. So there's also an issue, which I haven't drawn on in this presentation, but which we're currently doing some analyses on students' experiences of STEM degrees that they're actually putting them off, continuing with STEM, but particularly among, for example, women and so on. So there's partly mismatch there. So we would say that schools, yes, are currently playing a bit of a problematic role, I mean, not just schools, education policy, in stopping enough young people. We would love more young people to continue, not just for STEM jobs, but also for active citizenship. That's really important, I think, in the modern world. STEM skills are useful for lots of things and for agency and social action. I don't think just increasing STEM jobs will solve it. We already are being told that there are these gaps and these, you know, shortages in key areas that are really important to the future and things that are around solving global grand challenges. And we're not getting the flow through. And we know that because these processes are in place, it's actually particularly more likely to stop underprivileged young people from continuing. So our view is that it won't sort itself out. For us, pedagogy is not the only thing, but it's one of the things we can do something about. I hope that helps. So there are two more questions. Shweta, Masaya, can you share all the links with participants? Thank you so much. Yes, everyone's very welcome to copy my slides. Ayush has a question. He has a comment. I'm wondering if your qualitative data also included folks who are translamid, transmax, and so, and if so, I'd be interested in hearing how they were experiencing the clever, hard-masking piece of the answer. Great question. Thank you. Yes, so in our qualitative and our quantitative, we've got a number of... In the quantitative, we've got a number of trans young people. In the qualitative, we only have one. So it was difficult for us to just talk about their experiences per se, but I think they did find the clever notion of STEM, like the other young people, a bit exclusionary as well and difficult to navigate. So it's... But I don't want to over-claim from just their one experience but also not be to identify with them in our sample either. But yeah. Ayush, you have a follow-up question? OK, all right. Anyone else who questions? You can turn to my corner and ask. In the meanwhile, I had a question. So your sample actually consisted of, I mean, a huge number of participants, 48,000 young people, that's quite a large number. So I mean, did you also ensure that there is a participation? I mean, the kind of representation is across various social categories. Yeah, so we tried to ensure that our sample was roughly representative. I mean, it's quite hard to be, it's never perfectly representative, but we did against main around gender and race and poverty and areas of the country and so on. OK, regional, OK. And so there's a long comment or question here, two of them. Ayush has said something here. There is one Ashwati has asked your question yourself. That would be nice comment. If you'd like to make a comment or ask the question. Ashwati, yeah. Am I audible? Yeah, yeah, you are. Yeah, so thank you for the interesting talk. There were I just had two questions. One was were you surprised by any of your findings in terms of how they stand in relation to existing empirically supported sociological theories of social reproduction? And the second question that I had, do you need do you want to answer that? And then this one to the second question. OK, yeah, thanks. So yeah, I think two things mainly surprised us. So one, I was surprised by how few children, particularly in age 10, wanted to be a scientist because they were really loving science. You know, they're so positive. We kind of thought the world is there was to I think the statistic that statistically there was no change. So some other studies suggest that, you know, there's declining interest over time in science. But I think that surprised us that it was so low, so young, and it was already so patent. Is someone wants to describe our research as deeply depressing? And I suspect that's unfortunately true. And I think the other thing that surprised me was the analysis of social mobility. So a lot of studies have tried to focus on what it is that makes some young people socially mobile and not others, or in our case, intergenerational, educationally mobile. And the thing that surprised me there was the role of luck. So it hasn't been looked at by many other studies. We've got a paper that's currently under review that tries to tease that out and to come up with more of a sociological theorization of luck. We really were surprised how little had ever been written about that before, when actually it seemed really important. So we take a sociological view of luck, of seeing luck as a structural issue in that paper. And we're trying to tease out what it was that was lucky and it was access to social and education, cultural capital. But yeah, that surprised and slightly also depressed me. OK, you wanted to ask the second question. Yeah, thanks a lot. I mean, I'd really like to read your work on the sociological basis of luck. The second question that I had was I was just curious to know that since you were tracking students over 13 years and and you probably witnessed some of the participants like Vanessa, a progressively experienced exclusion. Did you feel the need to intervene or support her? Thanks, it's a that's a really good question, a good point. It's it was really difficult. Ethically, you know, we have to go off to go through lots of university ethics, and we're not meant to intervene. I think we we ended up as as, you know, as individuals sometimes because you develop, you know, particularly the people I interviewed and the same people and the same parents and young people I interviewed over time, you come to really know and care about them. And it's, you know, so often at the end of the interview, sometimes families would say, oh, can you help? You know, in this way or that or point me to some information or something. So we would, in those cases, where we were asked as individuals, but also we were quite aware that it's not we, you know, the interview is confidential. So often sometimes it's not that respondents wanted us to go and solve all their problems for them. But having the space, sometimes it almost felt like not not counselling, but having the space to be heard felt really important for some of them who were having, you know, quite difficult experiences. So again, that was the sort of I think that the way we we managed a lot of those relationships as well. Thanks a lot for sharing that. There is one long question from Chaitanya. He's asking, learning the message of messaging of awareness being needed for science or physics, what kind of alternative messaging would you suggest? In other words, if not cleverness, then what should we be telling young people is needed if anything at all is needed to do science? Also, how could such messaging be operationalized in areas like curriculum or assessment because it feels like the present messaging is reinforced by assessment and selection. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So when we shared our work with some of our partners, so like the Institute of Physics, for instance, they have then gone off and looked at their messaging and said, well, actually, we want to work with the teachers they work with to promote the message that, you know, anyone can do science, that it's science as a notion is open for everyone and really work with those teachers to stop them making those little comments that we were hearing from young people like, you know, you need a boy brain to do science, or this is going to be really hard. Things like that. So I think on a practical level, there are things that people have started to do with teachers just to help them, you know, just be aware of those little things that they probably weren't even aware that they were saying. That's teachers are a bigger policy level. We're still arguing that, you know, with the regulatory bodies, along with other partners that actually there should be no great severity in science because that again really underlines that message that it is different and that it is harder. So it's sort of at different levels that I think things can be done. But so it's not saying that you don't need high grades if you're going to go and do a physics degree, for instance. But it is that notion that you don't have to be clever to do physics. I think an alternative message to be good at a subject, you work really hard at it, I think is a, you know, valuing hard work is a useful message beyond being naturally brilliant at it and help it working with teachers through professional development to see some of those gender biases. There's a great study by Heidi Carlaw in the States that showed that teachers among advanced level physics course would describe the boys on the class in the group as, you know, that they're naturally brilliant at the subject, but a bit lazy and not doing as well. Whereas the girls who are taking higher, they're just really hardworking and that sort of these sort of gendered ideas of clodding diligence versus natural, natural, natural brilliance. So I think there's there's stuff that can be done like that because I agree the assessment practice. I think assessment is also too narrow. I think there are ways that we can teach science more broadly and assess science more broadly as well. That's interesting. Actually, I always wonder whether actually one of the physics requires cleverness and what about what about, you know, education? I mean, what about social sciences? I mean, history or sociology or anthropology? I mean, critical thinking. I mean, the very idea of equity is probably extremely difficult for many people to comprehend when I don't know why cleverness is attributed to only physics or mathematics for us. It's because that's what helps reinforce the high status of the subject. So we often make the argument that if we want to widen participation, we have to look at privilege and power. And we can't keep the status quo. We can't keep notions of status and hierarchy intact and just say, let's broaden it because that's not meaningful. So it's about looking at, you know, why is physics so high status? Partly it's because we construct it as clever, which aligns with white, middle class, masculinity and so on. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So any more questions? Comments? Deepika? Yeah. When girls in your study talked about physics requiring an effortless cleverness, what were the notions boys held in the corresponding age group? Yeah. So thank you. Good question as well. So I mean, actually, you know, the girls and the boys in the study have similar views of you need to be clever to do physics. But the boys were more likely to say, yeah, I'm good at physics. And the girls were more likely to say, oh, I have to work really hard to do well in physics. So it's have been how you relate yourself to those ideas and what makes it more possible for some students to feel themselves and to be recognized by others as good at good at physics. So, yes, I would say it was that it's not the boys were not attaining higher, but the issues around masculinity and identity meant that and they were getting more encouragement as well from the teachers. Statistically, they were being encouragement. So of course, they were more likely to feel good at it. So there's one more question from Zinath. She asks, do you feel that the portrayal of scientists as negative and as as antagonists in most movies and comics for children also? In fact, they're interested to become. Yeah, good question. Thank you. So, yes, I think that I mean, the representations of scientists that we have. They all feed into that that notion of, you know, where we get these ideas of the effortlessly clever genius scientists from this from these films. And so I mean, I think the issue of whether how negative or not they are. I mean, they're problematic for me. But often there's like the lone genius scientist or, you know, when I put, you know, whether the scientist has gone to Mars, I can't remember, Matt Damon or someone in that film or the clever genius who comes up with the equation or the sum that solves everything. Or the, you know, it's these are it's the alignment of it, but particularly with white masculinity, I think, that is it's the you know, reinforcing it absolutely there. And now asks, can you say why there was difference in girls and why is it a response to such questions? I would say that's the social reproduction of gender in society. I think that, you know, we gender our children in such and often in such binary ways and everything's interpreted through that, but we're socialized, you know, into the these forms of of gendered habits. And I don't think it's due to any essentialism or natural. I think it's all learned. So like Victor learns over time. I don't think children are born thinking naturally just different things. So Deepika has another question. Your study students tracks trajectories and other disciplines such as chemistry and biology. Yeah, so so yeah, in our survey, we followed students. We're tracking whatever their trajectories are. So some of them are in arts, science, you know, social sciences, all different. And we haven't done this detailed analysis of all the roots. There's a lot of data there to work through. But we are at the moment doing analyses comparing between physics, chemistry, biology, maths, computing and engineering and medicine as sort of seven main stem areas to see what it's. So we're finding different patterns in attrition, for example, the likelihood of feeling that you might not complete your degree between those subjects and so on. So we're going to try and do those. And then we also compare those to nonce. At the moment, we're doing analysis compared to non stem students to put those in context in that way. But yes, they have a whole range of lovely and interesting trajectories. I just need more time to do it. So I also have this one question. I mean, do you do you feel that biology, which is becoming a little bit more mathematical these days than before? I don't know, physics and physics and mathematics centre biology these days than before. So has it changed the earlier there are more women in biology? Has the has the number remained the same or has it come down to do have any? Yeah, I think pretty much the sense I still high numbers of women in biology and very low numbers of women in engineering and physics as a pattern. I think what our students are definitely finding interesting is that in school, they had quite fixed ideas of what is biology, what is chemistry, what is physics when they get to university. They're all saying, oh, hang on, I'm doing some coding in this. I'm doing data, you know, there's math that they could see the interlinking across the different areas more once they get to HG. And, you know, because they've sometimes if you're a biologist, you might sometimes be taught biochemistry if you're doing a bit of biochemistry. But then there are also these practices where people reinforce these disciplinary identities. They say, of course, you're biologists and I'm a chemist. Again, there's identity work going on there that we're going to be interested to try and unpick as well. So there are a few more questions. I can take a couple of questions. Otherwise, we have finished the time. If there is one kind of urgent question, I can certainly ask. Otherwise, we'll thank you very much. It was a wonderful session, and we hope to see you in India sometime when you come to India, we'll talk to you much more. Thank you very much. That would be wonderful. It's really nice to join you all. Thank you for your questions. Thank you.