Challenging Gender Stereotypes Using Virtual Pedagogical Characters

A long-standing issue in higher education in engineering and other technical fields has been that of recruitment and retention of female students. The arguments for this are many, and here we will restrict our interest to recruitment with the support of virtual coaches. Baylor and collaborators demonstrated (Baylor & Plant, 2005; Baylor, Rosenberg-Kima, & Plant, 2006) that the use of virtual coaches portrayed as young and attractive females can increase the willingness of female students to chose technically oriented courses and help increase their belief in their own ability in technical domains. Processes of role modelling and identification (cf. Bandura, 1977, 2000) seem to be involved. The female students could more easily match these coaches with their personal identity compared to a virtual coach portrayed as a “typical male engineer” (see Figure 1). When the results of Baylor and collaborators are analysed in detail it appears, however, that the ABstRACt