Encouraging more female students to stay on for their 4th year

Here at the Cardiff University School of Physics and Astronomy we are dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive environment. After performing extensive research we realised that the gender split for those who wanted to embark on a 4-year Masters course was quite extreme. The proportion of female research postgraduates (PhD students) has been an average of 41.8% since 2013 with two years where more than 50% were female, which is well above the national average of 25.1%, and the taught postgraduate Masters programmes have attracted an average of 25.8% females enrolling. However, in 2017 we had 12 female and 21 male students registered on the MPhys degree at the start of the third year. Within two weeks of starting term two more male students asked for permission to transfer from BSc to MPhys, while 4 female students wanted to transfer from MPhys to BSc.

After this realisation, the EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) team started to encourage more female students to stay on for their 4th year. One of the four students had already made up her mind and transferred to the BSc, but our Director of Learning and Teaching spoke to the other three female students. It transpired that they were nervous about the idea of a fourth year in which half of the credits came from a project. This seemed to go against the usual gender trend of female students preferring some coursework rather than 100% examination. We realized that the apprehension was connected to the fact they had barely started their third-year project at the point they had to make the decision, and they could not imagine how the project might work. They were worried that a poor project might result in them getting a poor degree.

The actions taken by the team to help this situation were as follows:

1. Arrange for them to meet and speak to some female PhD students who had completed the MPhys at Cardiff.
2. Put the 4th year project catalogue on-line so that they could see some examples of the type of projects available.
3. Give them access to the average marks obtained by 4th year project students, which reassured them that students always enjoy their 4th year projects and generally do very well.

These actions proved effective as all three remaining female students remained on the MPhys course.

All these supporting materials are now put online at the beginning of year 3 and students are invited to an MPhys awareness session, involving MPhys graduates.