Encouraging girls to participate in LEP Activities

How the LEP encourages girls to participate

It is important that girls have a positive experience of engineering when they attend an engineering activity, to ensure that they feel comfortable in their learning environment and understand that engineering is a viable career option for them. 

At the LEP we aim to ensure that girls enjoy our activities and they are never in the minority when they are taking part in activity. It is really very easy to look at your own practice and see how you can make changes to encourage girls to take part.   

For example, a teacher at an LEP school changed the way they allocate places for the popular LEP Smallpeice residential courses.  At the school, they used to allocate places by running ‘a first come first served’ based system, resulting in predominantly boys taking the places.  To ensure that the girls get the opportunity to sign up to the courses, the teacher now operates slightly differently by simply offering 10 first come first served  places for girls and 10 first come first served places for boys, ensuring equal numbers.  

There are many practical steps the STEM community can take to engage girls directly; here are a few effective practices that we use at the LEP:  

• We request that our schools send equal numbers of girls and boys to every event
• We try to ensure that girls attending our events do not feel they are in the minority by working in girl only groups
• We use female fieldworkers (and/or student ambassadors) to speak at school assemblies to promote STEM activities to encourage the girls to attend and to act as positive role models in school
• We use student ambassadors and/or Science & Engineering Ambassadors (SEAs) who reflect our target students to support activities and again act as positive role models
• We use Science & Engineering Ambassadors that are one or two years into the professional practice to speak to students about their career and how they are now using their STEM degrees
• We ensure that promotional materials reflect the target audience of students that we want to attract and ensure they aren’t stereotypical and they have an equal ratio of genders represented.  This can mean organising a photo shoot with the role models.  Once you have a more diverse audience attending your events of course it will be much easier to source these photos as you take advantage of these photo opportunities
• We ensure the use images of girls and boys doing a hands on activity, looking happy and engaged, rather than a posed image
• We design our STEM activities or projects to appeal to both girls and boys, so that everyone is engaged. At the LEP we always provide a context for the activity so that students can see how the problem relates to the real world and the importance of the work done by engineers
• We provide practical Gender Equality training specifically tailored to who we are working with and have run many training days for partners, fieldworkers, teachers and ambassadors sharing our practical approaches in how to engage girls in engineering and related subjects

At the LEP we also have a fieldworker dedicated to helping the team focus on these issues.  The aim of the UKRC fieldworker is to support the fieldworkers in ensuring all our activities, materials and delivery styles are inclusive to girls.

As part of our work we have developed the below leaflet aimed at parents, to explain why they should encourage their daughters to study engineering.  Download it below or contactus@thelep.org.uk and we can send you some printed copies.