Researchers Asked Kids to ‘Draw a Scientist.’ Here’s What They Came Up With

Between 1966 and 1977, a group of researchers gave more than 5,000 schoolchildren a simple instruction: Draw a scientist. The kids drew scientists of all kinds: some with white coats, some peering into microscopes, some with facial hair. But out of the 5,000 children, just 28 — less than 1% — drew a woman. Since the results of that study were published in 1983, the “Draw-A-Scientist” experiment has been repeated dozens of times. Now a new meta-analysis, published in the journal Child Development, looked at 78 studies of U.S. children — some completed as recently as 2017 — to see how things have changed. “Given that children might see a greater representation of female scientists [today] and are more often seeing female scientists in media marketed toward children, we wanted to know: How are those cultural changes influencing children’s images? Have children’s stereotypes changed along with them?” says David Miller, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Northwestern University and one of the study’s authors. “The basic finding is that, indeed, yes.” “Draw-a-Scientist” picture courtesy of Vasilia Christidou In studies completed since 1985, accounting for almost 21,000 kids, about 28% of children drew female scientists, Miller says. Girls are significantly more likely than boys to draw female scientists — 42% of girls’ drawings depicted female scientists, compared to just 5% ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthytime onetime Research Source Type: news