Below is an article written by Dr. Tiffani Razavi, Visiting Research Professor at The Bahá’ì Chair for World Peace.
This article first appeared in The International Educator, Vol. 34 No. 4 April 2020.
Draw a scientist. This simple gender-neutral instruction has become a classic way to access the social perceptions of children. The original research (Chambers, 1983) conducted from 1966 to 1977, was based on a sample of 4807 children from kindergarten to grade five (mostly from grades two and three) in Canada, the United States and Australia. The finding that out of 4807 pictures, “28 women scientists were drawn, all by girls (who constituted 49% of the sample)” is only briefly mentioned. That’s just 0.6 percent.
You might be thinking that was then and we’ve all moved on. Stereotypes are not what they were. Women are scientists and anything else they choose in today’s world, and children, both boys and girls know it. And you would be right. Up to a point. A couple of years ago Chambers’ study caught the attention of David Miller and a group of researchers from Northwestern University, interested in gender stereotypes. Their 2018 meta-analysis of 78 draw-a-scientist studies involving over 20,000 K-12 children and spanning five decades shows that from the 1980s, an average of 28 percent of children drew female scientists. So it is true that children’s depictions of scientists have become more gender diverse over time, but at 28 percent there is also still a long way to go to address deep-seated stereotypes, especially considering that, even taking into account the tendency for children to produce same sex drawings, there is a still a significant gender difference in this analysis – boys drew female scientists only 5 percent of the time, compared to 45 percent for girls.
Draw-a-scientist studies serve to illustrate (quite literally) an unconscious gender bias, the assumption that a person is male unless otherwise stated, what author Carolina Criado Perez calls the “default male” in her recent book, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. “The male experience, the male perspective, has come to be seen as universal,” says Perez, “while the female experience – that of half the global population, after all – is seen as, well, niche.” At a very fundamental level, “man” and “human” are synonymous, and our world is essentially structured around this “default male,” Perez points out, from the diagnosis of heart attacks to the designation of sports teams. Because the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall, the stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future, films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics, all are marked by what Perez calls the ‘absent presence’ of women, summed up in the gender data gap.
It is important to note that the data gap is generally neither malicious nor even deliberate. “It is simply the product of a way of thinking that has been around for millennia and is therefore a kind of not thinking”, says Perez. Historically, virtually every sphere of human activity has been characterized by the presence of fewer women than men, so as a collective, our societies have neither the perspective nor the data relating to this half of the population.
“In the long run, stereotypes reflect what people observe in everyday life. They are not myths,” comments Professor Alice Eagly, who was also involved in Miller’s meta-analysis. The findings from the draw-a-scientist study stem from children’s experience, not from some abstract notion of gender equality gone wrong. In that sense, Miller’s results confirm Perez’s point – the children just don’t have the data. And it doesn’t get any better as they grow up. In fact, the findings indicate that as children get older, they increasingly associate science with men. Even girls become more likely to draw scientists as men: 6-year-old girls draw 70 percent of scientists as women, but by 16, the pattern is reversed and they draw around 75 percent of scientists as men. The proportion flips around age 10 or 11. “Middle school is a critical period in which they’re learning this gendered information about what is a scientist,” says Miller.
What are these children observing about gender? The default male is everywhere when you start to look – in television and movies (according to the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, females accounted for fewer than a third of speaking characters in 1,100 films released during 11 consecutive years ending in 2017), everyday spoken language (the struggle for acceptance of a gender-neutral singular pronoun in English) and stuffed animals (one study found that significantly more adults and children use “he” and think of gender-neutral animal toys as male), and, of course, books.
“Few instruments shape children’s and young people’s minds more powerfully than the teaching and learning materials used in schools,” reads a 2016 UNESCO policy paper for the Global Education Monitoring report, which finds that textbooks around the world still under-represent women, and reinforce traditional roles. “Gender bias in textbooks is one of the best camouflaged and hardest to budge rocks in the road to gender equality in education,” the authors comment.
A recent study of children’s science books currently available to children in libraries (Wibraham and Caldwell, 2018) found that they are not balanced in their representation of gender. In an eerie mirroring of Miller’s finding, Wibraham and Caldwell report that images of adults demonstrated under-representation of women in both physics and mathematics books, but images of children showed no significant difference between genders, and that books targeted at older children contained fewer images of adult females.
An analysis of children’s books published in the Observer (2017) found that the ratio of male to female characters was about 3:2, that male characters are twice as likely to be in leading roles, and that they have many more speaking parts than female characters. As for the 60 percent of non-human characters (such as animals, plants and crayons), 73 percent were assigned the male gender pronoun. (It is worth noting, though, that it was a children’s book that in 2012 propelled into Swedish the now commonly-used gender-neutral pronoun.)
It is quite likely that many of us didn’t realize the pervasiveness of the bias. We didn’t think about it. We got caught in the gender data gap trap, which Perez identifies as “both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male.” But we’re getting to know the default male, acknowledging that the gender data gap is real and that it takes conscious effort to close it.
About the Author:
Tiffani Betts Razavi (DPhil. Oxon) is a Visiting Research Professor at the University of Maryland Bahá’í Chair for World Peace and a senior staff writer for The International Educator. Her research and writing explore people and their environments, the changing nature of work and education, and the conversations that connect observation and insight with practice.
This article first appeared in The International Educator, Vol. 34 No. 4 April 2020.
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