Kids more likely to imagine women when asked to draw a scientist

Education Forum
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This was one of those nice little articles about how maybe the world is getting less sexist and racist. If you are looking for female role models in the sciences, BioLogos has lots of articles profiling good ones. :slight_smile:

Female theologians and Bible scholars, however… a little harder to find. I’m pretty sure if the study was done with college students and they had to draw a theologian, it’d be pretty much all white males.

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Yeah - but mightn’t they all be dead white males?

[grasping for any distinction I can get…]

…seriously, though… that is cool that younger imaginations have broadened their concepts of roles and who can fill them! I don’t mean to make light of that.

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A depressing experiment I saw over 20 years ago: there was a group of middle school AA children visiting the university. They were presented with a young AA woman (an astrophysicist) and a garden variety white dude (from the storeroom) and asked to guess who was the scientist. You can guess the unsurprising result. Now you could argue they were just playing the odds, but I think we all know it was more cultural than statistical.

I wonder if there’d be a different outcome today?

Edit: typo

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Women are now the majority among medical school students, at least in Texas. Maybe not true scientists, but sometimes wear white lab coats, though that has changed also.

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Roger Olson has lamented the lack of support for young men and perhaps this is part of what is taking place. Women are now urged to go into the sciences, higher education and careers, and there are lots of organizations that help, but young men are on their own at least as far as public support groups go. I suspect that this leads to different perceptions of the role of men and women among children, even though we may not be there in reality, yet.

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Collins noted in his book "Language of God’ that those of us with a “Y” chromosome are 14 times more likely to end up in jail. We’re a bit like a drunk on a horse–we figure out the problem of listing to one side, then fall off the other. I’m glad that my 5 year old daughter is likely to be free to be a doc (and of the 3 of my kids, she’s the most interested in it; I’m encouraging that), but I wonder if we are risking stereotyping by trying to fix the problem, too.

Coming back to the Cross, we can glorify God in everything we do (as Eric Liddell’s mission leader in Chariots of Fire said, in “peeling a spud”); it makes me wonder if we lean too much to man’s definition of success.

I would love to see my daughter walk to get her med school diploma, though :).

I just read the Blue Parakeet (by Audible) and found it very good. I have been thinking about posting a book review, but want to read a bit on others’ perspectives before I do.

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