The ASPIRES2 report – a longitudinal study of young people’s science and career aspirations, age 10-19 – was released at the end of February. As Gender Action was inspired by the research in the first ASPIRES project, we were particularly interested to see what the next stage of this research would show. Professor Louise Archer and Emily Macleod from UCL Institute of Education, who worked on the ASPIRES project, are key members of the Gender Action team,

You can read the executive summary and the full report on the ASPIRES2 webpage.

This blog is a brief summary of some of the key points from the report:

The study found that careers aspirations are relatively stable for young people from ages 10-19. This highlights the importance in taking gender disparities in aspirations seriously, even with young children.

It also found that persistent, low science aspirations, regardless of gender, are not due to lack of interest in science.

The ASPIRES2 findings are summarised in this great diagram, showing what shapes a young person’s science aspirations and identities.

Issues highlighted that prevent young people progressing in science include:

Educational gatekeeping such as limiting access to Triple Science at GCSE
Poor or non-existent careers education
Ideas around 'cleverness' and ‘masculinity’, particularly for physics
Low science capital
Other existing structural inequalities of gender, ethnicity and social class

The diagram below shows the recommendations for the STEM education policy and practice communities for how they might usefully consider changes to how they think about STEM engagement and inspiration work and changes to what they do in practice.