Good science teaching needs to encourage, invite, engage, excite, interrogate, challenge, and shine, like a beacon signaling that science is truly for everyone. Seeing the light, girls would flock toward this science classroom, feeling connected, competent, and anxious to engage in scientific experiences. In "Reflections on being female in school science," Karen Mayer (1998) pulls apart and teases out the multiple layers of the absence of social entitlement to science for girls and women. From her world as scientist, she extracts what she knows about making connections to lived experience, questioning natural phenomena in these experiences, and seeking the students' own questions, into her science education classroom. She describes the duality, by way of her conversational and scholarly voices, of the scientist/educator engaged with her students' lives and capable of helping them interrogate the scientific questions that inform their experience and the joint experiences of the class and the teacher. Her work models the best we can imagine for doing science well with girls and all students. It pulls apart the artificial separation between that which is "scientific" and that which is "personal," and by so doing, provides meaningful context for the science classroom.
There is much work supporting the alienation of females from science education (Hubbard, 1988;Keller, 1985;Koch, 1990;Rosser, 1990;Sanders, Koch, & Urso, 1997). In countless science autobiographies, young women expressed sentiments ranging from "I knew early on that science was not for me" to stories about science classes where they did well because "I knew how to memorize and repeat, but science never had anything to do with me and I couldn't wait to stop taking it" (Koch, 1990(Koch, , 1993)). While males as well as females react poorly to the decontextualized context of many science classrooms, many boys hang on because they imagine that they are supposed to, while most girls flee. This should be a red flag to educators. When almost half of our students are engaged in what Meyer refers to as "active avoidance," science educators need to ask, "What are we doing wrong?"
Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard referred to science as "made, by and large, by a self-perpetuating, self-reflexive group: by the chosen for the chosen." (Hubbard, 1988). The same can be said about science education. Hubbard asked, "How can we have a science that is more open and accessible, a science for the people? And to what extent could-or should-it also be a science by the people?" (Hubbard, 1988). At first glance, the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1995) appear to incorporate many of the pedagogies of personal engagement that gender equity educators know work well to encourage the participation of females in science. Upon further examination, the standards consistently fall back on the rhetoric of "science for all" while