Inequality and gender bias in hiring female physics teachers in private educational institutions: an analysis of the INEP’s survey Censo Escolar da Educação Básica from 2014 to 2021

Abstract

The female presence in Physics has been the object of study in recent years, motivated by the gender disparity in the area. However, the presence of women teaching physics in 9-12 schools, both public and private, is still a little discussed topic. The present work aims to present a comparative study regarding the presence of women as Physics teachers in public and private schools, in addition to evaluating and quantifying their training. It is characterized by a descriptive survey research with a quantitative approach and analyzes the data gathered by an yearly survey of elementary through high school national education system (Censo Escolar da Educação Básica) conducted by INEP, an agency of the Ministry of Education from 2014 to 2021 using Python programming language in order to observe if any trend of change could be observed over this time interval. The data obtained indicate that over the period there was no significant change in the female presence in the role of Physics teacher, as well as it was observed that the distribution of this presence varies between Brazilian regions and states. It was also verified that an adequate professional training of both men and women does not reach 50% of the total number of teachers in this discipline, a fact that had already been pointed out in works by other authors. An important aspect that we highlight is that the percentage of female Physics teachers is lower in private schools than in public schools and that the workload of women is, on average, lower than that of men in both administrative facilities. The work suggests that there may be a gender bias in the hiring of teachers, especially in private schools, as if women were not seen as competent to teach this subject.