What you find in this news
The underrepresentation of women in STEM
According to the European Parliament, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) careers are considered to be the jobs of the future and around 7 million new STEM jobs are expected by 2025 in Europe.
However, there is a worrying underrepresentation of women in STEM: according to UNESCO, only 35% of all students enrolled in STEM-related fields are women and only 28% of all researchers worldwide are women.
While the demand for STEM-related positions in the labour market will continue to grow, what is lacking is a large pool of talent and a variety of concepts and ideas that can lead to innovation.
How Art Can Bridge the Gender Gap
Recognition of women’s creative abilities in STEM is an innovative initiative that recognises their key role in driving growth and promoting inclusivity. In fact, by ensuring equal opportunities in STEM education and careers, we pave the way for new perspectives and pave the way for a sustainable future.
The WeSTEAM project, funded by the EU through the Erasmus+ programme, actively promotes the STEAM (STEM + Arts) approach among women in STEM fields, emphasising the development of creative skills. By investing in the educational process and encouraging artistic thinking, the project aims to capture the attention and curiosity of women, promoting their engagement in STEM subjects and increasing their chances of employment in high-level positions in the ICT labour market once they graduate.
For the WeSTEAM project, Sineglossa was responsible for structuring the skills framework. It was the result of research conducted through focus groups with STEM students and artists, which showed that the artistic creative process and the scientific one have many common elements, starting with the 4 stages into which the two kind of processes can be divided:
12 Exercises for each phase of the creative process
Recently, the Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture published the WeSTEAM handbook, developed by Sineglossa in collaboration with WeSETAM project’s partners, which provides a set of training tools and exercises to increase key soft skills in female students attending STEM university courses.
The handbook provides 3 activities for each stage of the creative process (incubation, imagination, creation, evolution) with the aim of guiding participants through the steps necessary to develop and finalise a project (artistic or scientific) and to improve their skills during this educational and creative process. The activities in the toolkit will help the students develop soft skills such as analytical thinking, curiosity, open-mindedness, goal-oriented thinking, awareness, teamwork, observation and more. Some of the activities developed were previously tested during the Ars Electronica training mobility in Linz.
