Published April 17, 2023 | Version v1
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SciGirls - Empowering Girls in Science Through Astronomy

Description

The world faces a massive gender gap in science. In Ethiopia, only ~ 13% of all scientists are women, and this number becomes even lower when considering fundamental sciences. In addition, if able to continue with their studies at the secondary school level, girls avoid choosing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields mainly due to the lack of support, information, and role models. This becomes even more evident when going to remote and rural areas, where 80% of the Ethiopian population lives. The SciGirls project aims to improve in the long term the gender gap in science and the current lack of girls in STEM by empowering secondary school girls from rural areas and their female science teachers through astronomy and its multidisciplinarity. To do so, we organised a strong capacity-building workshop for 30 participants from different regions of Ethiopia, with an aim to build the future advocates of STEM in rural areas through trained girls and female teachers. The SciGirls is one of the OAD-IAU 2022-funded projects, with the strong support of the Ethiopian Space Science and Geospatial Institute. Through this talk, we will share our experience, and give more details about the project and its future developments. The workshop organised was extremely successful and through our experience, we would like to motivate others to use the SciGirls as a pilot project and model in other countries and areas. 

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SciGirls_MirjanaPovic_invited_13March2023.pdf

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