**Author details**

*Theorizing STEM Education in the 21st Century*

maybe over prepared to these institutions.

the community that girls can be successful in STEM.

utilizing student-centered approaches to teaching and learning, linking learning to real-world situations, group work, peer teaching, providing opportunities for students to increase their interest in STEM, linking content to prior experiences, providing first-hand experiences, encouraging discussion and reflections of the social importance of STEM fields, engaging students in collaborative learning, and a safe learning environment which all concur with research concerned with bridging the gender gap in STEM fields [6, 23, 26, 28]. This was documented in the ECASE reports as early as 2013 [47] in which it was noted that teachers have improved considerably in maintaining collaboration and adopting student centered pedagogies in their teaching [47]. Teachers were also viewed by all participants as supportive, encouraging and caring being viewed by most of them as "parents", though in almost all cases, students referred to the fact that teachers were still in need of more professional development. Research shows that quality caring teachers' support is crucial for a female equitable STEM experience [18, 22, 23, 29, 36]. Although there was variation of perspectives around the idea of single sex schooling, there was consensus that it provided a safe, comfortable environment for learning where collaboration and minimized competition was present. However, from the input provided by the participants, single sex school experience in itself and by itself was not a guarantee for gender equity learning experience in STEM [36, 38, 39]. In two cases, the outcome of the experience was not positive in the long term. It was hard for some of the girls to adapt to an environment where they had to deal with male and female students together in an academic environment. As a result, they felt frustrated at certain points for not being able to socially adjust to a coed institution environment though they were academically well prepared and

The tension between providing a female-friendly, safe, and comfortable environment for female STEM students to work in; and at the same time nurturing the skills of being a part of a wider society was problematic. There is a need, therefore, for a balanced educational situation where girls are provided with the safe environment to learn and at the same time get involved in a socialization process that prepares them to the college level where a coeducational setting prevails both inside and outside Egypt [1, 3, 13]. Indeed, in the new STEM schools in Egypt, girls and boys attend the same school with classes inside the schools segregated by gender. Though this decision was made for economic reasons because it is hard to build a separate STEM school for each gender in each city, it can be one way to alleviate the tension between providing the female friendly safe environment while helping consolidate the socialization process that they will need later on in their academic and professional life.

Gender inequity in STEM in Egypt is a complex issue. While research denotes different reasons that would influence a girl's preference of an education pathway, the education and career choices of the participants in this study were deeply influenced by their family and community [47]. With the socio-cultural aspects in the background personal aspects like self-efficacy, resistance, and persistence play a great role in students' decisions to pursue STEM fields [24, 25]. As indicated in the literature, girls experience stereotype threat throughout their schooling related to the pursuit of a STEM career. In Western countries, these biases are often implicit and experienced as micro-aggressions [3, 4], however, in the Arab world, girls experience explicit and direct bias from family and society [10, 11]. Thus, the government stance of providing STEM schools for girls is an important statement to

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**7. Conclusion**

Mohamed El Nagdi1 \* and Gillian Heather Roehrig2


\*Address all correspondence to: elnag003@umn.edu

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
