Female Role Models: an effective lever to encourage girls to pursue scientific studies?

Summary In France, as in most developed countries, the underrepresentation of women in scientific fields is a significant barrier to professional equality. Since 2014, the L'Oréal Foundation's For Girls in Science awareness-raising program has offered one-hour interventions that are delivered in classrooms by young women with a scientific background (L'Oréal Group employees and young researchers). The objective of these interventions is to counteract the stereotypes associated with scientific careers and the place of women in science, in order to make scientific careers more attractive to young girls. Based on a random assignment evaluation protocol involving nearly 20,000 students enrolled in the second and final year of science classes in a hundred high schools in the Ile-de-France region in 2015-2016, we show that these one-time interventions lead to a significant decrease in students' stereotypical representations of science careers and gendered differences in aptitude for science, for both girls and boys. Although these interventions have no detectable impact on the study choices of students in the second year of secondary school and of boys in the final year of secondary school, they do have significant effects on the post-baccalaureate orientation of girls in the final year of secondary school: among the latter, the proportion going on to a scientific preparatory class (CPGE) has increased from 11% to 14.5% (i.e. an increase of 30%). One of the lessons of the study is that the ability to influence the career choices of young girls does not depend solely on the effectiveness of female role models in deconstructing stereotypes concerning scientific professions and the place of women and men in science, but also on the type of identification triggered by exposure to the model. In France, as in most developed nations, the under-representation of women in the sciences is a major obstacle to achieving equality in the workplace.