Ask a child to draw a scientist, and she’s more likely than ever to draw a woman

Dr. Ruth, sizing it up

Good news from the gender stereotypes battlefield. Kids don't fall into that gender trap, at least up to a certain age when it all seems to unravel.

I am probably one of those exceptions because I always associated and still associate a scientist with a woman. Like Dr. Ruth Westheimer. She inspired me and I always looked up to her. Literally.

Perhaps it had to do with the field of her science, but I am also very partial to others. Be that as it may, here is the study.

Kids More Likely to Draw Scientists as Women

Ask a child to draw a scientist, and she’s more likely than ever to draw a woman. That’s according to a new study in Child Development. Researchers analyzed 78 “draw-a-scientist” studies dating back to the 1960s, involving 20,000 kids in kindergarten through 12th grade. Between 1966 and 1977, the paper says, less than 1 percent of U.S. kids chose to draw a woman when prompted to draw a scientist. But in studies from 1985 to 2016, 28 percent of children drew a female scientist, on average, with both girls and boys drawing women more often over time. Girls still drew female scientists much more often than boys, however.

“Our results suggest that children’s stereotypes change as women’s and men’s roles change in society,” co-author Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Children still draw more male than female scientists in recent studies, but that is expected because women remain a minority in several science fields.” Eagly and her co-authors also looked at how children form stereotypes about gender and science and found that they don’t begin to associate science with men until grade school.

The Development of Children's Gender‐Science Stereotypes: A Meta‐analysis of 5 Decades of U.S. Draw‐A‐Scientist Studies

Here the 'Conclusion and Implications' of the study.

In summary, the Draw-A-Scientist literature provided a valuable opportunity to study developmental and cultural change in the same meta-analysis and compare studies on a simple common metric assessing children’s associations of science with men. Our meta-analysis is the first systematic, quantitative review of this extensive literature spanning 5 decades of data collection. Based on 78 studies with over 20,000 children, U.S. children’s drawings of scientists depicted female scientists more often in later decades but less often among older children. These results suggest both agerelated and historical time-related changes in children’s gender-science stereotypes. The time-related change was consistent with increases in women’s representation in U.S. science. However, even in recent years, children may still learn to associate science with men because women remain underrepresented in some science fields. Consistent with this hypothesis, children in recent samples still drew more male than female scientists on average.

Pdf here