Blue is For Boys, Science is For Boys, What's For Girls? A Critical Look at Gender Constructs in Science Toys
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian born women are severely underrepresented amongst science students and researchers in Canada. This is due in part to the cultural construction of science as "unfeminine" and "for boys." Educational toys are often the first avenue in which children are introduced to and engage with scientific culture. Parents have traditionally used gender symbols in toys to teach children gender roles, appropriate values and actions. The current study investigates the possibility of science toys as a socializing agent for gendered beliefs about science. It does so, by completing a content analysis and qualitative analysis of the pairing of gender and science symbols within 400 science toys. This analysis found that science toys contained a substantial number of masculine symbols. Overt symbols such as boys alone on the package occurred three times more often than girls. Feminine mentors were symbolically annihilated among all disciplines making up less than 10% of all scientists. Covert symbols such as masculine shades, themes and child absent from the package were more common than gender neutral or feminine themes. Finally, the use of masculine symbolism differed by discipline, pointing towards several sub-cultures in science representing different degrees of adherence to masculine symbolism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it