Encouraging scientific vocations from high school onwards: the new “Education” division of the féMINistes! association

For more than ten years, the féMINistes! association has been working within the School to promote gender equality and combat sexist discrimination. With a team of dedicated students organized into several areas (public speaking, fieldwork, communication, VSS, and, since this year, education), it works throughout the year in conjunction with the School’s management and other student associations.

In a context where women remain under-represented in engineering programs, the issue of career guidance appears to be crucial. According to the 2024 overview published by the Conference of Directors of French Engineering Schools (CDEFI), female students will represent around 32% of the student body in French engineering schools for the 2023-2024 academic year. Despite slow progress in recent years, this gap persists and raises questions about career guidance mechanisms. Educational choices are made early on and are still influenced by different perceptions of scientific and technical fields.

The association created an “Education” division to intervene at an early stage. Its goal is to encourage more young women to consider scientific studies by deconstructing preconceived notions about careers and educational paths, which are often mistakenly perceived as being reserved for men.

An “Education” division already active in the field

Since the beginning of the school year, members of the division have visited three schools, working with middle and high school classes. These activities take the form of interactive workshops aimed at challenging prejudices related to gender and scientific fields. The discussions are aimed at all students, both girls and boys, in order to encourage collective reflection on representations, guidance, and the place of women in science.

At the same time, several members of the association have participated in round tables and interviews as part of “Women and Science” initiatives, thus helping to bring these topics beyond the school.

The center’s intervention in a middle school as part of a workshop

Consolidating and amplifying action in 2026

For 2026, the ambition is twofold: to continue the interventions already underway and to strengthen their scope. The association wishes to increase the number of partner institutions and structure long-term collaborations with those already involved. This dynamic aims to make the “Education” division a permanent and progressive initiative.

Through this new division, FéMINistes! is taking action that complements its internal commitments at the School: to influence perceptions starting in secondary school in order to contribute, in the longer term, to greater gender diversity in scientific training programs.

How do your visits to middle and high schools work in practice, and what feedback do you receive from students and teaching staff?

During a typical visit, two or three members of the team visit each class to talk to the students. We briefly introduce ourselves as engineering students, then engage in a discussion with the class to define together what an engineer is, which allows their initial perceptions to emerge. We then launch a workshop that we have prepared in advance, which aims to deconstruct gender stereotypes, particularly in scientific fields. These workshops are educational and encourage students to express themselves on these topics. After the workshop, we discuss their feelings with the class, and the conversation naturally moves on to broader topics.

Teachers are generally delighted with the workshops and want to repeat them with other classes to reach as many students as possible. Students are often happy to take part in fun activities and to be able to discuss these topics to learn a little more, and they often have lots of questions about our career paths and experiences at engineering school.

What are the cluster’s priorities for 2026, and how do you plan to embed these actions in the educational landscape in the long term?

During our term, we want to build on the foundations laid by the previous term, which created the cluster. As this cluster is very new, there is still a lot of room for improvement and ways to diversify what we offer. For the moment, the main focus will be on returning to the schools we have already visited and increasing the number of schools we visit. Having partner schools would allow us to work with the same classes every year and really play a part in the students’ educational landscape. We would also like to diversify the workshops we offer so that we can adapt to the age of the students and their existing awareness in order to make our interventions even more relevant. The education division also plans to participate in forums and round tables on women in science, as it has done in the past, many of which are communicated to us by the administration. The division is at the heart of the objectives of the entire féMINistes ! association, which aims to deconstruct gender stereotypes and advocates for gender parity.

Through the commitment of its student association, these initiatives are part of the broader dynamic promoted by Mines Paris – PSL in terms of equality, diversity, and inclusivity. They are part of a structured effort to promote gender diversity in scientific and technical training, both within the School and beyond the campus, in line with the institutional framework.

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