
US kids’ doodles of scientists reveal changing gender stereotypes - onuralp
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03346-7
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adventured
That study actually shows that almost nothing has changed in a quarter of a
century.

They're referencing 1986-2016 at 72%, versus ~67% from 2010-2017, as a
meaningful improvement. That supposedly meaningful improvement is almost
entirely wiped out if you adjust just one of the recent outlier data points
down to the average. Or alternatively, to show how little actual improvement
there has been in a quarter century, drop the data off pre 1992, that 72% vs
67% improvement might even regress (someone want to test that?). That's pretty
shaky ground for such a big claim.

Pretty ridiculous article premise given the data in question. There's
obviously a lot more work to do on improving the gender stereotype problem the
article is claiming has improved, particularly since it has somewhere between
barely changed and not changed at all in decades.

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ars
This could just as easily mean that children simply don't see scientists
anymore and have no idea what they look like.

For me scientists are certainly far far less visible than they used to be.
It's all programmers now.

What would help would be correlating "draw a person", from the same child and
seeing if a scientist varies from that.

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webkike
Kids never saw scientists. I never saw a scientist when I was a kid. And I was
a child fairly recently.

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Mononokay
Most of the giant media-loved scientists have died at this point - Sagan,
Feynman, Salk, Pavlov, etc, and are finally starting to drop out of public-
rememberance.

The 20th century had a lot of movies featuring (fictional) scientists, like
Dr. Strangelove and Men in Black, too.

They were represented quite a bit.

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Consultant32452
Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are very big in pop culture. My daughter is
10 and came home singing "Bill Bill Bill Bill, Bill Nye the Science Guy"
because her school still plays old episodes. NdT had a prime time series on a
major network. I'm not gonna suggest they're "as big" as Sagan or Feynman was,
but they're really big.

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spodek
What about kids' doodles of mine workers, garbage collectors, soldiers killed
in war, prisoners, and other undesirable fields?

I would guess they still draw mostly men. Or rather, I would guess they don't
even draw them or think about them. I don't hear many calls for equality
there.

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dvfjsdhgfv
The idea is that women are severely underrepresented in STEM and that
negatively influences their standard of life. It wouldn't make any sense to
convince them they should be garbage collectors or miners in the same way as
it makes little sense to ask men to become nurses. With STEM it's different:
there are great advantages, both to women themselves and the society in
general, if the proportions change.

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DanBC
But also, there are programmes to increase the number of women in mining and
construction, and the number of men in nursing and teaching.

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jdaaph
what a fit tho

