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Last week was a holiday week with fewer days of school for my kids, so I decided to do a little experiment with them and the other kids on our street who were willing to participate. What I asked them to do was simple; I said, “Draw a scientist.” I didn’t give them any other directions.
I didn’t make up this experiment—researchers have been asking children of various ages to “Draw a scientist” for more than five decades. They don’t do this because they are interested in children’s art; instead, they are interested in how children think about scientists and, more specifically, whether they think of them as male or female. The very first study using the “draw a scientist” task included drawings from children between the years of 1966 and 1977. Not surprisingly, nearly every single drawing collected featured a male scientist. In fact, less than 1 percent of children drew a woman. Importantly, both boys and girls participated in this study, so the girls were just as likely as the boys to picture scientists as exclusively male (Chambers, 1983).
And it isn’t because kids are more likely to draw males across all occupations: When another group of researchers asked children to draw scientists and teachers, while most children drew male scientists, they were much more likely to draw teachers as female than male (Losh, Wilke, & Pop, 2008).
Ever since these now classic studies were published, the “Draw a scientist” task has become a litmus test for how well women are represented in the sciences, including science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. And according to this litmus test, there are improvements on the horizon.
More recently, researchers reviewed 78 studies using the “Draw a scientist” task, including the drawings of more than 20,000 children across five decades, to look at changes in the task across time. They found that overall, when you collapse across all of the studies, 73 percent of the drawings depicted scientists as male. But importantly, children were less likely to draw male scientists in the later decades when compared to the earlier ones, suggesting that there has been some improvement in children’s perceptions of female scientists over the years. The improvement seems to be specifically in the way girls view scientists, with 99 percent of girls in 1983 drawing male scientists, but only 55 percent of girls drawing male scientists in more recent years. That’s a major improvement!
But the news isn’t all positive. While younger children were more likely to draw female scientists, this decreased as children got older. Older children were more likely to draw male scientists when compared to younger kids. Before the ages of 7 or 8, most kids drew their own gender, with boys more likely to draw men and girls more likely to draw women. But by age 14 and 15, all kids were drawing more males than females by a ratio of 4 to 1. The drawings also became more stereotyped as children got older, featuring most scientists wearing lab coats and glasses (Miller et al., 2018).
Why does this happen? There are a lot of reasons, starting with the way scientists are depicted on television, in books, and in other media. It isn’t surprising that in the 1960s and 1970s, almost every child thought of scientists as male, because most scientists were male, and they were certainly depicted that way in the media. In recent years, however, women are more often depicted as scientists on television and in movies, and they don’t just wear white lab coats and glasses. But there is still work to be done. Women are still grossly underrepresented in STEM careers. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, women only made up about 28 percent of the STEM workforce worldwide in 2024; this is compared to the 47 percent of the non-STEM workforce that women occupy. This is still a huge gap. And it is one that older children recognize, which is likely why older children become less and less likely to draw female scientists.
So what do we do about it? From a big picture perspective, women still lack support in STEM positions, particularly women who decide to have children at some point during their careers. So there is a lot of work that still needs to be done on a policy level to even the playing field. But there is also work we can be doing at home by making sure our kids—especially our girls—are exposed to female scientists in their lives, in the movies and television shows they watch, and in the books they read. Girls don’t draw female scientists because the scientists they eventually come to know—either real or fictional—aren’t likely to be women. That’s something every parent can work on.
In my own little home experiment, I saw patterns very similar to what the recent data shows. I received 12 drawings, four of female scientists and eight of male scientists. The seven younger kids all drew their own gender; the boys drew men, and the girls drew women. But of the five older children, only one drew a woman—my son. I could brag about how progressive he is, but in reality, this isn’t surprising because the only exposure he’s had to a scientist is his mom (me!). This means that we can do a lot to change this trend at home by showing kids, especially girls, examples of female scientists whenever we can, so they grow up learning that anyone can be a scientist, even a girl.
Wanna try this at home? We’d love for you to share your kids’ drawings with us! You can send it to [email protected]. Please include your child’s gender and age.
