Investigating stereotypes in early years: Changing perceptions of engineering

Professor Helen Bridle, Heriot-Watt University
RSE Personal Research Fellowship awardee

Engineering is a crucial industry that employs 6.3 million people in the UK, which equates to 19% of all jobs[1]. However, the sector suffers from a severe skills shortage and significant gender imbalance. Despite efforts to tackle the problem, stereotypes related to gender and engineering as a career serve to dissuade young people, especially girls, from considering and pursuing a career in engineering.

Professor Helen Bridle at Heriot-Watt University explains that children begin forming career aspirations as young as four and that at a similar age, they are also strongly influenced by gender stereotypes. She adds that while research into early years engineering is growing, the studies are limited, and many questions remain unanswered.

Recognising that the identification of harmful gender stereotypes in early childhood is critical to driving social change, Professor Bridle was awarded an RSE Personal Research Fellowship to develop a new methodology to investigate the role of stereotypes relating to gender, ethnicity, and social class, and how this influences children’s perceptions of engineering. Throughout her award, she has been applying this method to measure stereotypes amongst 3–7-year-olds within Scottish schools and nurseries and utilising the results to design and assess the impact of different interventions to tackle negative stereotypes.

Professor Bridle has been exploring different intervention activities based on her previous experience creating research-informed school resources, which she gained through an EPSRC Engagement Champions project called Let’s Do Engineering. Her work during her RSE award has focused explicitly on comparing traditional engineering activities–building a wind turbine, a water filter, etc.–with creative arts approaches such as drama, music, and circus skills.

To conduct her research, Professor Bridle has developed an app to use with the children to gather their responses. She hopes that having created this tool, it will serve as a standardised approach that can be used across other disciplines, such as science, to produce comparable results across sectors.

Professor Bridle said,

“While we talk about the need to tackle stereotypes, we need to understand exactly what those stereotypes are to begin with and how they change with age. This is what will help us design better interventions.

Some fascinating findings around gender show that younger children usually think that their gender is the best. However, when they reach five or six years old, children start to express that boys are better at science and engineering than girls. We, therefore, need to find out: where does this happen? How does it happen? If we know that a switch happens around the age of five, we can ensure that children are exposed to resources that include a greater diversity of role models around the age of four.”

Professor Bridle said her RSE award has allowed her to approach the challenge differently. With her background in engineering, Professor Bridle has now been able to investigate an area she knows well, but from a psychology perspective. Moving from the engineering department to the social sciences department within the same university has allowed her to broaden her research remit and foster interdepartmental collaborations.

Looking to the future, Professor Bridle wishes to expand her programme, leveraging further funding to gather more data, which she will use to develop new school resources. She believes that tackling stereotypes in the early years will help children leave their career options open, make more informed choices, and follow their dreams. Her ultimate goal is for the research findings to inform the Scottish curriculum and for all young people to know that they can access a career in engineering if they wish to.

[1] Key stats infographic – EngineeringUK