Announcing collaboration with WISE Campaign: People Like Me Electronics resource pack and training day
The UKESF has collaborated with the WISE Campaign to produce an Electronics-specific version of the People Like Me resource pack for schools.
WISE launched People Like Me in September 2015 as a new way to encourage girls aged 11–14 to take a greater interest in STEM at school and to consider the related career options. The resource pack uses a self-descriptive quiz to help girls discover their strengths and find out about women similar to them who are happy and successful working in careers in STEM.
The UKESF’s collaboration with WISE makes Electronics the first sector to have its own specialised pack and, ahead of the official launch, a People Like Me training day was held on 12th April 2016 for a number of representatives from the companies who had provided case studies.
The day was kindly hosted by Leonardo, Luton, and began with a presentation about unconscious bias that considered how to bypass the brain’s natural processing shortcuts and challenge perceptions. The People Like Me resource pack training then explained how girls generally favour collaborative activities over competitive ones, how they tend to think about the future at an earlier age than boys, and other research which has informed the resource pack. The training attendees took the self-descriptive quiz for themselves and found the results to largely provide an accurate reflection of their job roles in the Electronics sector.
The training attendees had great things to say about People Like Me:
“People Like Me is a refreshing campaign which enables young women to visualise themselves in a STEM career, by showing them how their soft skills and personality traits can fit perfectly into the STEM industry.
I particularly liked that the materials allow the young women to take some time to reflect on themselves as an individual, and also the de-bunking of salary myths and the myth that STEM is a restrictive choice for GCSE and their careers.
Young women need to know that by choosing STEM subjects, they are opening themselves up to plethora industries and careers and opportunities, and I think People Like Me delivers this message.”
“Thank you so much for the course yesterday. I found it very interesting and useful. The lack of women in STEM has long been something I’ve been very passionate about, ever since I started Computer Science A-Level and wondered where all the other girls were!
Hopefully we can inspire some of the girls [at a local school] to see that it is a valid career choice if they’re interested, and that there are some women out there and they wouldn’t be on their own! I have three daughters, so a lot of the training, particularly on unconscious bias, is very useful there as well. I particularly liked the way the personality adjectives chart showed how easily those traits could be transferred into a STEM career and how they would be useful.
Keep up the great work!”
For more information
Click here to find out more about the People Like Me Electronics resource pack.