This unit is centered around the theme of gender equality, which means that men and women should have equal rights, equal resources and equal opportunities. An important issue is the right to education.
In this project, you will work in small groups of four or five to investigate the situation in your school. You need to collect information on the ratios of female to male students and to find out whether there is any relationship between these ratios and students' majors or subject fields. Here are the steps for you to follow to complete the task.
Select five majors or departments in your university and decide the size of the sample for each major (e.g. one or two classes). Make sure these majors cover a variety of fields such as natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities and arts.
Collect data. Use appropriate methodsto find out the number of female and male students in each major, and then calculate the respective ratios of female to male students.
Analyze your data. Compare the ratios across the five majors to see whether you can find any relationship between gender and majors.
Discuss the potential reasons for the existence / lack of differences between different majors in terms of gender ratio. Here are somehints:
. Career plans.
. Personal interest
. Traditional views toward gender roles
. Intrinsic biological differences between genders
5. Present your findings in class based on thefollowing outline:
· Purpose of your project
. Research methods: What are the five majors you selected, and why did you select them? What was your sample size for each major? How did you analyze the data?
. Findings
. Factors that account for the findings
