@article{b6a45cd5c9d54b36ae504aab71423ade,
title = "The Development of Children's Gender-Science Stereotypes: A Meta-analysis of 5 Decades of U.S. Draw-A-Scientist Studies",
abstract = "This meta-analysis, spanning 5 decades of Draw-A-Scientist studies, examined U.S. children's gender-science stereotypes linking science with men. These stereotypes should have weakened over time because women's representation in science has risen substantially in the United States, and mass media increasingly depict female scientists. Based on 78 studies (N = 20,860; grades K-12), children's drawings of scientists depicted female scientists more often in later decades, but less often among older children. Children's depictions of scientists therefore have become more gender diverse over time, but children still associate science with men as they grow older. These results may reflect that children observe more male than female scientists in their environments, even though women's representation in science has increased over time.",
author = "Miller, {David I.} and Nolla, {Kyle M.} and Eagly, {Alice H.} and Uttal, {David H.}",
note = "Funding Information: Adults in many nations associate science with men much more than with women (e.g., Miller, Eagly, & Linn,; Smyth & Nosek,). To investigate the origins of these associations, researchers have studied children's perceptions of scientists over several decades. For instance, children were asked to draw a scientist in a landmark study of nearly 5,000 elementary school students who were mostly from the United States and Canada (Chambers,). The drawings, collected from 1966 to 1977, almost exclusively depicted male scientists, often with lab coats, eyeglasses, and facial hair, working indoors with laboratory equipment. Only 28 children drew a female scientist (0.6% of the sample), suggesting strong gender-science stereotypes linking science with men. This limited view of scientists might have restricted children's science-related educational and career aspirations, to the extent that children did not identify with such depictions. Since Chambers () collected data in the 1960s and 1970s, however, women's representation in science has risen substantially in the United States. For instance, women earned 19% of U.S. chemistry bachelor's degrees in 1966 but 48% of such degrees in 2015 (National Science Foundation,). Female scientists are also now more often depicted in popular children's television shows (Long et?al.,), science textbooks (Pienta & Smith,), magazines such as Highlights for Children (Previs,), and other mass media products (Steinke,). We studied how children's gender-science stereotypes have changed over 5 decades by meta-analyzing the expansive literature of U.S. Draw-A-Scientist studies. Individual studies are often uninformative in studying cultural change because they typically include only one point in time or one cohort. Meta-analytic methods, however, can overcome this limitation by comparing children across multiple decades. Moreover, this drawing task has been widely administered in grade levels varying from early elementary school to late high school, allowing us to study both developmental and historical change in the same meta-analysis. Funding Information: David I. Miller was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-0824162). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 Society for Research in Child Development",
year = "2018",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1111/cdev.13039",
language = "English",
volume = "89",
pages = "1943--1955",
journal = "Child Development",
issn = "0009-3920",
publisher = "Wiley-Blackwell",
number = "6",
}