“Anyone can do it.” To combat the abandonment of girls in science subjects, the “Girls and Mathematics” plan, presented by Elisabeth Borne and implemented since the beginning of the 2025 school year, tries once again to open a path forward.
Train school staff, prevent sexist and sexual violence, establish role models for female students. The proposals are numerous and some have already been presented by different organizations.
Prejudices to break
One thing worth remembering: There is no scientific evidence that men have cognitive advantages over women in fields like mathematics or computer science. However, this belief remains ingrained in the minds of high school students (30% of boys and 18% of girls believe in it, according to researcher Marion Monnet).
It is at the origin of a phenomenon called stereotype threat. Thus, people subject to a stereotype are impacted in their performance. It was highlighted in 1999 by three American psychologists, Steven Spencer, Claude Steele and Diane Quinn, through an experiment.
Three mixed groups of people faced the same math test. The difference between these groups is the way this upstream exam was presented:
- The first group was told that the results of men and women were equivalent when this test was previously performed.
- In the second group, it was specified that there were differences in the results between men and women when this test was performed previously.
- In the third group nothing was specified.
What did the researchers conclude? In the first group, the test results were balanced between men and women. In the second and third groups, men obtained better results than women. The existence of prejudices directly impacts performance.
Professionals to inspire
To help eliminate these biases, several movements and associations have emerged that highlight female profiles that have approached technology. This is the case of “Elles Bougent”, a national movement led by Isabelle Huet and supported by “more than 15,000 godmothers throughout the territory.”
The association works from primary school to higher education to raise awareness among young women about technological careers. She is creating a sponsorship system: each godmother is a woman with scientific training who will pass on her experience to the young women.
There are other similar initiatives, such as Genre de sciences, launched by the Centrale Méditerranée Societal Lab. In this project, students come to talk and share their experiences with fourth, third or second year students (before choosing specialization courses in secondary school).
An experience that takes place over half a day and whose “feedback, from students and teachers, is favorable,” as Guillaume Quiquerez, director of the Societal Lab, explains to Tech&Co. “The students who participated even return to testify several years later, once they are students,” adds Guillaume Quiquerez.
Role models for reintegration
The “Girls and Mathematics” plan aims to facilitate the efforts of associations that want to work against the abandonment of girls in science. One proposal, in particular, would like female students to be able to “benefit from spending at least one hour with a female role model in a small group (about fifteen students) each year of high school.”
The question of including more role models also arises in the culture and media space, where women working in IT professions are still few. Historical female figures in the world of information technologies, almost erased from school textbooks, are also affected.
Ada Lovelace, Margaret Hamilton or even Katherine Johnson, it is appropriate to “reintegrate the first female engineers into the discourse,” hopes Lolita Aboa, winner of the 2025 digital engineering award. “We must change the way we tell science.”
A collective challenge
At the same time, with godmothers and other role models, a collective effort must be made to break these biases, according to several interlocutors. On the front line are teachers, who “without necessarily being aware of it, have a real influence on guidance”, analyzes Olivier Sidokpohou, one of the authors of the report “Girls and Mathematics”.
The “Girls and Mathematics” plan, established from the report she co-wrote, calls for two hours of gender bias awareness-raising for school staff at the start of the 2025 school year. The project also adds an additional day of training for mathematics teachers on these same topics. The goal is above all to eliminate the Pygmalion and Golem effects (explained in the previous article in this series).
But awareness should not be limited to teachers. With “Elles Bougent”, Isabelle Huet, for example, offers resources to establishments to raise awareness among young people about these issues. The family circle is also concerned: “We try to raise awareness among parents about these issues, especially about small everyday details,” says the general director of “Elles Bougent.”
Businesses also have a role to play. They can help introduce the professional digital world to younger generations. “We have testimonies from young girls who, during a visit to a company, say they had the spark,” says Isabelle Huet.
Separate to give more space
Another proposal that experts often raise is to temporarily separate girls and boys during sessions that are highly subject to bias. An effective way to help girls gain confidence. “In general, boys stand out more than girls. Girls must be among them to dare to exchange and not limit themselves,” analyzes Isabelle Huet.
Sébastien Guichard suggests that computer science projects in middle or high school in which all-girl teams would take on all-boy teams. The objective is to demonstrate that “girls are not illegitimate.”
There are other initiatives such as the Discovery pools at School 42 in Paris. This is a programming training, spread over 5 days, only accessible to women. The female students interviewed during one of these sessions explained that in the presence of men, within the framework of their computer training, they would have been “afraid of being noticed”, or even had “the feeling of being in the way”.
“Let go of prejudices”
Finally, the last tip is to do it. For Lolita Aboa, her curiosity led her to start her career as a digital engineer. After high school, the young woman thought she would escape mathematics by studying journalism. There she discovered data journalism, which led her to pursue further studies at DUT in statistics.
At the same time, she began to discover computing “alone, without a teacher, in my free time.” Then he will join a cycle of engineering in computer science and statistics. Through her journey, Lolita hopes to demonstrate that “everyone can do it”, despite “a somewhat damaged history” like hers, and even though we think that “the die is cast from the moment you are born when you are a woman.”
Asma, Inesse and Saïna, three students they met during programming training at school 42, share the same opinion. The young women advise “taking an interest in information technologies” and “leaving prejudices aside.”
If crude technology has difficulty convincing some students, it is important to highlight the transversality of the field. Isabelle Huet talks about hybrid paths in technology, with “care”, for example. Bioinformatics and medical technology are two fields that are gaining notoriety.
Popularizing technology, demystifying it, also means showing that “everyone can do it.” The image conveyed today of IT continues to be that of a very complex environment that requires advanced knowledge. For the young women interviewed, progressively training in programming and seeing opportunities in the sector helps break down prejudices.
The challenge is not only to give women the place they deserve. It is making a more just, more complete, more open society. It is about guaranteeing that technology is designed by the two complementary hemispheres of the same world.
Source: BFM TV
