Gênero, ciências e mídia : representações de mulheres cientistas entre estudantes do 2° ano do ensino médio em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to identify the representations of women scientists among high school adolescents living in Belo Horizonte. In order to do so, we had four focus groups (two in public schools and two in private schools), that had been adapted to suit an area of studies known as Reception Studies, which aspires to comprehend how different public circles signify and elaborate media contents. The groups’ dynamics consisted of watching excerpts of television programs (soap operas, merchandising, news reports, cartoons and advertisements) and discussing each afterwards. A semi-structured script was used to guide the conversation. To organize and analyze the obtained material, we used Content Analysis. As this work’s scope is wide, so was the theoretical framework we needed. First, in order to discuss the situation of women in science, we researched papers that aimed to analyze gender inequalities within scientific careers. Then, we sought to find the likely causes and explanations of such inequalities within feminist history of science and feminist epistemology. Later, we went into the specialized literature of scientists’ representations among children and adolescents in order to better understand the issues and problems we were dealing with so as to finally, analyze our own material with focus on gender, power and communication relations.The analysis of our data allowed us to catch a glimpse of a scenery marked by tensions and ambivalences: at the same time students’ visions are not so monolithic as we would expect them to be years ago – revealing reconfigurations and mutations in their representations – we also noticed that perceptions are still somehow marked out by conceptions which are linked to old ways of conceiving science and gender roles.