#GAReads | Researchers Asked Kids to 'Draw a Scientist.' Here's What They Came Up With
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"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.