Discover, Grow, Fly. Supporting Early STEM with Irish Girl Guides
Year Awarded
2025
Amount
€47,635
- Organisation:Dublin City University (DCU)
Project Summary
This project aims to embed STEM practice in Irish Girl Guides (IGG), focusing on the youngest cohort from five to seven years of age. This cohort, referred to as the Ladybirds, undertake compulsory challenges each year to receive interest badges and move through the Ladybird three-year programme.
Research suggests that girls and women disengage from STEM at consecutive stages throughout their educational journey (Speers 2023, Sarraju et al., 2023) and that a key factor in females disengaging from STEM is a lack of or poor STEM identity and limited female role models (Limm & Meer, 2020).
IGG are a forward-thinking organisation who already include several STEM-related interest badges for the Ladybird cohort, for example, engineering, robotics, space and aviation. Working with young girls in informal, female-only environments provides a singular opportunity to introduce STEM early and to disrupt the development of gendered STEM stereotypes (Bilton and Watts 2020, World Bank, 2020).
However, IGG volunteers are predominantly female, the very cohort that is consistently lost through the leaky STEM pipeline. We argue that working with leaders to improve their knowledge and STEM identity will have a meaningful impact on opportunities provided for young girls for years to come. For this reason, we aim to work with 10-20 Ladybird Leaders and adult senior branch members (18-30 years) from Dublin, Meath and Kildare. The project will develop materials that enable Ladybird leaders to meet the criteria for existing challenge badges, embed STEM skills, knowledge and dispositions and encourage positive STEM identity.