Reflecting on Fifty Years of Progress for Women in Science

Like young women today, 50 years ago I too assumed that gender discrimination in science was a thing of the past. Girls who grew up in America in the Sputnik era, as I did, were encouraged to become scientists. By 1964, when I graduated from college with a major in biology, I thought it entirely possible I’d win a Nobel prize. Why not? Dorothy Hodgkin won one that year. At Harvard, my professors had strongly encouraged me to go to graduate school. When I finished my postdoc in 1973, I was actively recruited to the MIT faculty. What were those feminists complaining about

Encouraging children to mentalise about a perceived outgroup increases prosocial behaviour towards outgroup members

We investigated whether encouraging young children to discuss the mental states of an immigrant group would elicit more prosocial behaviour towards them and impact on their perception of a group member’s emotional experience. Five- and 6-year-old children were either prompted to talk about the thoughts and feelings of this social group or to talk about their actions. Across two studies, we found that this manipulation increased the extent to which children shared with a novel member of the immigrant group who was the victim of a minor transgression. The manipulation did not lead to greater sharing towards a victim from the children’s own culture and did not influence their perception of a victim’s negative emotions. These results may ultimately have implications for interventions aimed at fostering positive intergroup relations within the context of immigration

Youth representations of environmental protest

A necessary condition for a functioning democracy is the participation of its citizens, including its youth. This is particularly true for political participation in environmental decisions because these decisions can have intergenerational consequences. In this article we examine young people’s beliefs about one form of political participation - protest - in the context of communities affected by fracking and associated anti-fracking protest, and discuss the implications of these representations for education. Drawing on focus groups with 121 young people (age 15-19) in 5 schools and colleges near sites which have experienced anti-fracking protest in England and Northern Ireland, we find young people well-informed about avenues for formal and non-formal political participation against a background of disillusionment with formal political processes and varying levels of support for protest. We find representations of protest as disruptive, divisive, extreme, less desirable than other forms of participation, and ineffective in bringing about change but effective in awareness-raising. These representations are challenging, not least because the way protest is interpreted is critical to the way people think and act in the world. These representations of environmental protest must be challenged through formal education in order to safeguard the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and ensure that the spirit of Article 11 of the UK Human Rights Act is protected