Female Participation in Technical Courses Integrated to High School Professional and Technological Education

Abstract

Historically, women have been relegated to the role of caregivers, breeders, and maintainers of life in the domestic sphere. Even, for a long time, women´s education was based on the incorporation of sciences related to care, to the detriment of the Exact Sciences. Currently, studies show the increase in women's education in relation to men; however, women continue to be a minority in some areas of knowledge, which, in common sense, are directed at men. Thus, the objective of this research was to investigate the female representation in some technical courses integrated to high school, Professional and Technological Education (PTE), offered by the Federal Institute of Mato Grosso – Campus Cuiabá, Col. Octayde Jorge da Silva, from 2010 to 2019. After the locus of the study was defined, data were collected in two phases. In the first, the student enrollment listings of the courses were collected in the “Q-Acadêmico” system of the Campus. In the second, data were collected, on the Nilo Peçanha Platform, regarding female concentration in research locus and in other Federal Institutes of Brazil, between 2017 and 2019. From the analysis and discussion of the data, it was noticed that the female representativeness in the courses researched, was lower than the male one. This fact contradicts other studies that show that, in Brazil, enrollment in PTE has been occupied, mostly, by women. In addition, it was found that female dropout rates are lower than male and that the completion rates are higher. Thus, although girls had greater representation in PTE at the national level, in the study, this fact was not repeated.