A questão de gênero no curso de Licenciatura em Física da UTFPR – Curitiba: um olhar fenomenológico

Abstract

The role of women in scientific and technological environments has not been considered relevant to many researchers. In the whole world women are underrepresented in the fields of science, especially on Physics. The justification for this low representation have been investigated in the recent years and some reasons for these are the problems women face to conciliate their professional and personal lives and the vision of a male science, an idea which is reinforced by high school. Considering this female sub representation in the fields of Physics and the need to better comprehend the aspects that play a main role in the choice of a professional field. This work attempts to establish the reasons, the professional perspectives and conceptions attributed to the students of the training course for teachers from UTFPR (Curitiba campus) that made them choose Physics as the main field, the teaching task and the perspective of a continued education. It is attempted to identify if those factors are gender dependant or not. The analyzed data were collected through a test presented to students taking the training course for teachers from UTFPR (Curitiba campus). The quantitative data were analyzed with a statistical technique and the qualitative data were analyzed in a phenomenological perspective in the way the phenomenon is questioned. In this work the investigated phenomenon is the perception and the significance students ascribe to the gender issue in Science. The results indicate that the main reasons that led them to choose the Physics field are an affinity with engineering (exact sciences) and the existence of an influential physics teacher in the high school, although some students take Physics as a bridge to other fields like Engineering. The results show that the participants are interested in a continued education, by pursuing a master or a doctoral degree in a wide variety of knowledge, being Astronomy and Physics Teaching the most cited fields. Most of the participants aims to be a university professor or a researcher, what is suggested to be a consequence of the encouragement of the course they are engaged. As the gender factor, it was not observed a strong disagreement between males and females participants of the quiz about their perceptions of Physics and Science.