This is just one of the recommendations made in a new good practice guide published by the Institute of Physics (IOP) to help counter gender stereotyping in schools.
The guide, Opening Doors, was launched last month at a conference aimed at finding out what social science, psychology and neuroscience can teach us about overcoming the barriers to removing gender bias.
As well as the suggestion that schools should appoint gender champions in their leadership teams, the guide advises schools to ensure that sexist language is as unacceptable as racist and homophobic language and to present all subjects equally to students in terms of relative difficulty. It also offers some real-life examples of strategies used by schools to counter gender stereotyping.
In one school a member of the senior leadership team launched a gender awareness campaign among staff and students. Year 10 and 11 pupils were surveyed about sexist language and gender equality and a feminist society was set up to engage boys and girls in equality discussions.
Another school launched a Girls into Maths programme, working with girls and their parents to overcome their fears of maths and improve numeracy. A companion programme, Blokes into Books, provided a number of boys with Kindles in order to raise their reading age.
Dame Barbara Stocking, the chair of the conference, said: “We know we have a problem with gender stereotyping of subjects in schools. This is particularly an issue for girls in maths, physics and engineering, boys in modern foreign languages and a general underperformance in GCSE grades.”
The guide and conference are part of the IOP’s Opening Doors project. This was co-funded by the IOP and the Government Equalities Office and involved working with 10 schools in England to look at the barriers to overcoming the gender bias in boys’ and girls’ subject choices.
“The low uptake of physics among girls has been a long-standing concern of ours and a problem we’ve been trying to deal with for some time,” said IOP president Professor Roy Sambles.
You can download the guide at www.iop.org/publications/iop/2015/file_66429.pdf and for more on the project, email education@iop.org