Theatre, labs and gender: an education package to improve STEM working environment

Gender affects all aspects of life, and the working and learning environment of science, technology, engineering and geosciences presents no exception. Gender issues concerning access, permanence and ascension of women in exact and earth sciences careers in general relates between other causes, to the underrepresentation of women in science communications, sexual or moral harassment caused by professors and colleagues during undergraduate and graduate ages, or the overload of 5 housework for girls, when compared to boys, during early school ages. In other words, gender imbalance in science and technology careers may be seen as the result of a series of structured oppressions suffered by women of all ages. In this context, we propose the development of an education package designed to understand these processes at different levels. One of the tools of this package is known as the Theatre of the Oppressed. Elaborated by Augusto Boal in the 1970s, the Theatre of the Oppressed uses theatre techniques as means of promoting social and political changes. Usually, a scene takes place, revealing 10 an oppression situation. The audience becomes what is called "spect-actors", where they become active by exploring, showing, and transforming the reality in which they are living. In the context of gender issues in exact sciences careers, the students can stage situations that reveal subtle actions of power relations that usually put women in subservience places. Our experience showed that even though the acting is fiction, the spectators learn much from the enactment, because the simulation of real-life situations, problems, and solutions stimulates the practice of resistance to oppression in reality, within a condition that offers a 15 "safe space" for practicing making a change. The package also includes a set of laboratory routines based on the work of female scientists, directed to students from 12 to 18 years old. The idea of the labs is to work as a school reinforcement on natural sciences disciplines, and to give visibility to women in science, improving issues such as underrepresentation and mistrust in women work. We show the evaluation of learning efficiency by assessing the results of a quiz. 1 https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-2020-12 Preprint. Discussion started: 7 April 2020 c © Author(s) 2020. CC BY 4.0 License.

termed as women are distinct when compared to men. The studies that bring the theme gender and science in Brazil, begins in the mid-70, with the second feminist wave. The relevance attributed to this theme was made remarkable in 1990, with evidence of the absence of women throughout the history of science in the country (de Melo and Oliveira, 2006). Currently the research and actions related to gender and STEM have the collaboration of different institutions (academia, government, NGOs, spaces of formal education) to problematize, analyze and propose actions that can restructure and assign new meanings to science.
To better understand the existing asymmetries within scientific contexts related to gender, this section describes the academic 90 and educational scenario in the following order: distinctions between taste and learning throughout basic education; insertion of women in science courses; persistence in academia; professional advancement of men and women. After characterizing this analysis, the question follows: what still interferes with the distinctions between men and women? Finally, in a simplistic way, highlight the possible ways in front of the described scenario.
The worldwide scenario analyzed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO, 2017) 95 highlights significant advance in girls' participation in education, bringing emphasis to higher education. In assessing the presence and permanence of girls in basic education, despite increased access in many contexts, socioeconomic and cultural barriers still make it difficult or impossible for students to complete and benefit fully from the good educational quality of their choice. During primary education, when children are already exposed to science and math content, gender role stereotypes are already present Leslie et al. (2015); Dickhäuser and Meyer (2006). Teachers report that, in evaluations, they have different 100 expectations regarding learning in science and math for girls and boys (Dickhäuser and Meyer, 2006). The boundaries imposed by stereotypes are widened during adolescence, when gender roles become more entrenched for girls, including domestic and care responsibilities, the possibility of early marriage and pregnancy, and cultural norms that prioritize boys' education. These boundaries implies in higher rates of girls losing interest in STEM subjects with age (UNESCO, 2017;Sylvia et al., 2008).
By analyzing the situation of adults, women leave the STEM sector at much higher rates than men. Women represent 105 30% of researchers in STEM around the world, against to 53% of the world's bachelor's and master's graduates in the field. This gap varies from country to country due to different sociocultural facts (UNESCO, 2017). The leaky pipeline in STEM carreers represents a waste of social investment and individual effort, and suggests that there are structural problems around this scenario. The gender gap in STEM fields is certainly a complex issue, especially when considering intersectionality aspects such as race, class or global scale cultural variations.

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These data, while considering the specificities of each country and region, still show the persistence of a pattern: men are destined for areas popularly known as hard or difficult within STEM. The entrance and persistence of women in scientific areas is permeated by multiple symbolic references, implicit or not, that mark the limits of how far is possible to go within the power structure represented by science.
Some elements can influence the permanence of women in STEM courses, including the inspiration and support of close and 115 influential people, such as family members and teachers (de Amorim et al., 2017). By staying in the courses, the construction of the academic career is also permeated by systems of oppression and power. Factors that influence women's permanence in careers in STEM include the compatibility that is perceived between certain STEM fields with female identity, compatibility with family obligations, and with the environment and working conditions. By analyzing the contribution of each gender in the total of scientific publications in Brazil from the Scopus database, culminating in the publication of the report by Elsevier (Allagnat et al., 2017), it was disclosed that 49% of Brazilian publications are female researchers. Comparing the proportion of genders between different areas of research in Scopus, it can be seen that most female researchers are present in Medicine and Biological Sciences, while Engineering and Earth and Exact Sciences are predominantly male fields. In analysis of the Lattes platform, maintained by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPQ), an average of 70% of PhDs in engineering and 60% of PhDs in Exact and Earth Sciences are male (Allagnat et al., 2017;Lima, 2017).

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There are multiple factors that overlap and influence girls' participation, performance, and advancement in women in STEM studies and careers, with all of them interacting in complex ways: individual, family, school, and social (Black, 2020). However, there are elements that permeate these distinct areas: machismo and patriarchy. According to Bellini (2018), patriarchy is a social organization that gives power mainly to older male figures, placing women in natural places of submission, while machismo consists on a system of symbolic representations that contributes to constructions of relations based on the dom-130 ination of a male subject over a female. As reported by (de Amorim et al., 2017, p.8) "in a sexist culture, in environments where they are a minority, it is common for women to suffer from sexist language and jokes or bullying, making them more uncomfortable and fragile" . Other elements can intensify violence against women: the prejudice for their race, social class, age and education. A popular black woman suffers much more than a white, upper-class woman, but both suffer gender violence Ong et al. (2011);Bellini (2018). Considering that patriarchy, machismo and racism are structural and structuring within social 135 contexts, they are also formulated by social subjects and can thus be modified by assigning new meanings to what is understood as common, as natural.
In trajectories analyzed by physics students, for example, they emphasized the solitary path within the academic life (Lima, 2013). Given the cold or hostile climate, either at the entrance or during academic life in STEM courses, Amon (2017) highlights the importance of spaces for socialization among women.

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It is a common sense in the literature that education is crucial for reducing gender inequality in the areas of Exact and Earth Sciences, but the strategies may vary. In this paper, we are interested in strategies to mitigate the underrepresentation and to promote discussions on the glass ceiling issues.

The subjects
The University of Brasilia is the 4th most prominent university in Brazil, according to the "portal of transparency" (CGU, 2015) 145 and its resources are distributed between four camps. Planaltina Campus (FUP) was implemented before the Federal Government's higher education expansion program. The Planaltina Campus corresponds to the region that aggregates Planaltina, Sobradinho, Brazlândia, Sobradinho II, Formosa, Buritis, Cabeceiras, Planaltina de Goiás, Vila Boa and Água Fria de Goiás.
The Campus was officially inaugurated on May 16, 2006, with 70 students enrolled in the Natural Sciences Licensing and Bachelor of Agribusiness Management courses, with ten PhD professors.

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FUP exists for 13 years, being conceived in a plan of discentralization of the University infrastructure. The campus is situated 40 km away from the main campus, in Planaltina, a city of mainly lowincome population, surrounded by rural areas, which inspired the fact that all the offered courses are somehow related to earth sciences. Currently, the campus offers four undergraduation courses, including natural sciences licensing, peasant education, agrobusiness and agroecology management.
Together, these courses offer today 420 annual chairs for higher education, including diurnal, noturnal and full shifts courses.

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The campus also houses seven graduate courses : Environmental Sciences (master's and doctoral degree), Materials Science, Science Teaching, Public Management, Water Resources Management and Regulation , Environment and Rural Development, and Sustainability with Traditional Peoples and Territories (master's degree).
Despite the effort of offering courses that are market demanded in the region, a research conducted as a final project by one of Planaltina Campus students (Barros, 2013) showed that only 30% of Planaltina young population has the intention of 160 accessing the university. From those, only 15% pretend to study exact and earth sciences. According to data extracted at the beginning of 2020, we can see that Planaltina campus follows the gender gap found in the literature from data on student enrollment and graduation in all courses. Table 1 shows that in three courses of FUP -natural sciences licensing daytime (CNN) and nighttime (CND), and the teaching degree in peasant education (LEDOC) the entrance of female students is higher. These courses are degree courses for teacher training, which is a profession usually attached to 165 women. Therefore the entrance of 54% women is expected. In other two courses, environmental management (GAM) and agribusiness management (GEAGRO) we observe, a slightly male predominance at entrance, and a reversal of the pattern for gradutation rates. We also notice that in those courses women dropout rates for failing university condition is much lower than for men, which indicate that women present more effort during their formation. Women are the ones who graduate most in all FUP courses, with a total of 60.3%, but in the peasant education course it reaches 69.8% and in the courses with the highest 170 number of men, the index graduation rates for women reaches 56.9% and 52.9%, increasing the proportionality in relation class or a domestic situation. The idea of portraying some scenes was to get in touch with these situations revealing different scales and levels of the consequences of this society structure.
The first elaborated scene brings a clipping of a family that presents a woman, mother of two pre-teens, researcher and wife.
The scene also features another woman, the housekeeper and nanny of this family, who is also the mother of a girl.

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The scene begins with the tired researcher of a sleepless night working on a project, and dealing with the two children who stay on the cell phone all the time and argued tirelessly. At that time the housekeeper arrives, but she was late because she wasn't able to take the transport on time due to precary conditions of public transportation.
At this point, the housekeeper reported that the only alternative to get to work after a long wait was to take a crowded transport, and that she felt intimidated and afraid of suffering sexual harassment in the bus, a common situation when the bus 280 is crowded.
The scene continues with the housekeeper taking care of the house, the chaos that was the relationship of children while the researcher finishes her project with a new coffee. At this point the housekeeper's daughter calls her asking for a material to school and she responds saying that there is no way to buy it because she will come late from work. The scene has the intention to show the contradictions of the relations of these two women. They confide their difficulties at work and in life. One has 285 spent all night working on the project that has not even finished and the children do not rest until the housekeeper would arrive and take care of them. The housekeeper, on the other hand, is barely able to get to work because of the transportation in which she is likely to be harassed, she goes to work all day caring for her mistress's things and children but will not have time to take care of her own daughter's demands. It is a relationship of complicity and contradiction at the same time.
In another part of the scene the researcher has a clash with her daughter who needs to get ready to go swimming class. The 290 mother asks her daughter to wear a more "well-behaved" outfit because the girl is wearing shorts and a low-cut tank top so she will be harassed. And the fight revolves around the mother wanting to preserve the daughter from harassment and the daughter to defend the right to dress like this because it would be very hot.
The final part of the scene shows the researcher talking on the phone with her husband. In the call he says that that day he can pick up the girl in the swimming class, which makes she feels relieved and grateful that he will be able to finish the late 295 work she was doing. For a moment, within the reflection of the character she is extremely grateful to have a good husband who helps her with her children when she needs it. In the next instant she realizes that it is actually his function to care of the children, thus ending the first scene, and starting the discussions.
The second scene features a meeting between researchers discussing the organization of a scientific conference. In this scene we have three female researchers and three male researchers who present themselves as invisible men (the actors are not on 300 the scene). The scene begins with one of the female researchers reading the agenda, being constantly interrupted by one of the researchers, until one colleague interferes and asks him to stop so that the other can continue.
After the agenda of the approved meeting goes to the discussion of the definition of the event coordinator. The male researchers propose a senior researcher who coordinated previous editions, but is never present in any meeting, and the female researchers advocate the name of a woman that is truly involved with the event for coordination. She accepts the nomination 305 for coordenation, suggesting that the senior researcher should be invited as support so that joint work will be necessary due to on the housekeeper and researcher relationship. There was an explicit discomfort with that structure, where a set of gender oriented layered oppresssions are imposed, while a cruel class division also takes place. Once more, the private life aspects 375 got more attention, and it was interesting to notice that no interferences on the meeting configuration was proposed by the audience.
Our third performance was the invisible theater scene that happened at the campus, during a public presentation, where we simulated a "mensplaining" situation. We evaluated that invisible theater has a great potential of promoting silent reflections on people's own behavior. Although we still don't have the means to present a quantitative result of the impact of the scene, 380 we would like to register that the experience reverberated in our community in a positive way. We received relates from male professors that after the scene, they started to police themselves in order to avoid undesirable situations. We also evaluate that theater is suitable to mitigate university dropouts. To illustrate the theater potential on this concern, a student related to us that gave up from dropping out the university when she realized watching one of the project presentations that she was not the only girl that had the feeling that university was not designed for her, or that she should be at home taking care of her brother.

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Finally, we promoted a workshop in a public high school, with 70 students from 15 to 16 years old. The students were divided into 7 groups, and after a discussion on gender imbalance in STEM, they proposed their sketches. This time, the sketches were centered on the university access. The groups performed situations that they believed to limit their admission at a public university, such as police violence in front of the school, drug dealing at school, precarious public transport, lack of adequate places to study at home and the absence of good public libaries near their houses. It was interesting to notice 390 how different but relevant topics appear in each time a workhop is promoted with a different public. Theater allows personal experiences to be discussed in an organized and systematized way, without exposing intimacies. The mixture of real facts with theatrical elements makes the actor or actress confortable to expose intimate feelings or nuisances.

Conclusions
Our first goal was to bring into the university the discussion about gender gap in STEM carreers. We tried two different 395 approaches: bringing renomated scientists to public talks and debates, and created a group of studies, with students from three different courses. The debates were interesting, but the activities were punctual and did not reverberate within the entire campus community. The idea of the groups of studies was to give continuity to the debates. The bibliography of the study group was vast, and the students were engaged with the theme. The most interesting part of the group, though, happened when students brought into discussion their personal experiences, because it was at this point that the debate was incorporated by the 400 participants. However, talking about personal experiences is usually delicate, and it demands a lot of time from the entire group, to listen, and to promote a safe place for confidences. Thus we noticed that we had to provide a methodology that was capable of systematizing all the exposed experiences, without exposing intimacies and that could be performed in an organized amount of time. At the same time, we wanted to propose a method that could inspire changes to the reality that was being described by the participants. We used the data collected from the study groups to create the characters, the forum theater components and 405 the invisible theater sketches.