Children overall drew 73% of scientists as male

From The Development of Children's Gender‐Science Stereotypes: A Meta‐analysis of 5 Decades of U.S. Draw‐A‐Scientist Studies by David I. Miller, Kyle M. Nolla, Alice H. Eagly, and David H. Uttal.

I really enjoy it when researchers use found data to explore a particular hypothesis. I respect the imaginative creativity that allows them to make a link across disparate issues. In this instance, they are using a very large sample size of Draw-a-Scientist studies across multiple decades to chart how young children perceive gender association with careers, in particular, science.

From the 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.

The postmodernist view that all humans are a product of their social constructs holds that children's perceptions are shaped by what they see. If you have more women scientists in movies, you eventually get more women scientists. This marxian belief in the blank slate engineerability of humans underlies all the affirmative action and quota social policies which have become so common.

The alternative Classical Liberal science-based view is that people are free to do what they wish, that participation in fields of endeavor are largely personal choice influenced by heritable attributes and that stereotypes are mostly a function of empirical observation rather than bias and discrimination.

The literature on stereotype accuracy is reasonably extensive, so I'll set that aside. People's estimates are driven by what they see and experience, not by biases. And as I have discussed frequently in the past, after some four or five decades, what we are seeing (in the US and other egalitarian countries in Scandinavia and Europe) is that the more freedom of choice, enabled by social norms, law, and prosperity, the more gendered careers become. Russia and Iran have a lot higher percentage of female doctors and engineers than, say, Sweden.

Regardless of how socially, culturally, and legally egalitarian a country might be or how prosperous (which facilitates personal choice), gendered fields are the norm and that in high stress, high performance fields, high accountability fields (medicine, law, politics, academia, consulting, STEM, etc.) women tend to take about 30% of the top positions and that that lower representation is driven by family and family structure choices.

The postmodernist view suggests that as books, television and public policy has raised the profile of STEM women, that we should see an increase to equality of children's drawings of women as scientists. They note that:

Furthermore, female scientists are now depicted more often in children's media. For instance, women and girls were 13% of images of people in science feature stories in the popular magazine Highlights for Children in the 1960s, but this percentage rose to 44% by the 2000s (Previs, 2016). Likewise, women and girls were 39% of images of scientists in children's nonfiction trade books published in 1991–2011 (Rawson & McCool, 2014), 44% of images of scientists in middle school science textbooks published in 2008 (Pienta & Smith, 2012), and 42% of scientist characters in television programs popular among middle school‐age children in 2006 (Long et al., 2010).

Given this increased representation of female scientists, children might learn to associate science with both men and women. Exposure to female scientists might also weaken already‐formed associations of science with men (Farland, 2006; Galdi, Cadinu, & Tomasetto, 2014; Gonzalez, Dunlop, & Baron, 2017), especially if students identify with the female role models (Young, Rudman, Buettner, & McLean, 2013). Consistent with these hypotheses, women's representation among science majors and employed researchers predicted weaker national gender‐science stereotypes across 66 nations in one large study (Miller et al., 2015). Hence, children's stereotypes should partly reflect changes in women's representation in science over time.

Given this postmodernist worldview:

We therefore predicted that U.S. children would draw male scientists less often in later than earlier decades. Our meta‐analysis focused on U.S. samples to test this hypothesis because no other nation had enough relevant Draw‐A‐Scientist studies of children to allow examination of cultural change over several decades.

And that is what they found. The simple null hypotehsis was true, children drew more female scientists than at the beginning of the time series.

But that is not the end of the story. Given that women's media representation as scientists has been at the 30-45% level for some decades now, presumably that is what you would see from children.

But that is not the case. What was the beginning baseline of children's drawings? 99.6% were male (0.6%) in the 1960s.

Children drew 99.4% of scientists as male in Chambers’ (1983) study (data collection years 1966–1977).

Per the postmodernist view of media impressionable children, and given the media numbers above, it ought now to be 40-45% female and 55-60 male. But that is not what they found.

Children overall drew 73% of scientists as male, 95% CI [69, 77], averaged across all 78 analyzed samples using random effects weighting; this percentage was 72% excluding Chambers (1983).

From 1966-1977, the average drawing of female scientists was only 0.6%. Post 1977, the average has been 72% and steady.

There was a big jump in the 1960s and 1970s as women transitioned into all sectors of the workforce. After the big jump though, little change despite the prevalence of media representations of women. It appears that, consistent with research in the field of Stereotype accuracy, children are responding to what they see in reality rather than what is represented in media. This suggests that either children are classical liberals rather than postmodernists or that they appear so.

It also appears that media representation is not the force long assumed in the postmodernist world. From Fake News and Bots May Be Worrisome, but Their Political Power Is Overblown by Brendan Nyhan. While his article is focused on voting patterns, the science is broader. It is very hard to change people's opinions and it takes very specific conditions for that to occur. And those conditions are rarely met in terms of typical advertising, propaganda, campaigning.

How easy is it to change people’s votes in an election?

The answer, a growing number of studies conclude, is that most forms of political persuasion seem to have little effect at all.

This conclusion may sound jarring at a time when people are concerned about the effects of the false news articles that flooded Facebook and other online outlets during the 2016 election. Observers speculated that these so-called fake news articles swung the election to Donald J. Trump. Similar suggestions of large persuasion effects, supposedly pushing Mr. Trump to victory, have been made about online advertising from the firm Cambridge Analytica and content promoted by Russian bots.

Much more remains to be learned about the effects of these types of online activities, but people should not assume they had huge effects. Previous studies have found, for instance, that the effects of even television advertising (arguably a higher-impact medium) are very small. According to one credible estimate, the net effect of exposure to an additional ad shifts the partisan vote of approximately two people out of 10,000.

In fact, a recent meta-analysis of numerous different forms of campaign persuasion, including in-person canvassing and mail, finds that their average effect in general elections is zero.

Field experiments testing the effects of online ads on political candidates and issues have also found null effects. We shouldn’t be surprised — it’s hard to change people’s minds! Their votes are shaped by fundamental factors like which party they typically support and how they view the state of the economy. “Fake news” and bots are likely to have vastly smaller effects, especially given how polarized our politics have become.

Also see, The Minimal Persuasive Effects of Campaign Contact in General Elections: Evidence from 49 Field Experiments
Forthcoming, American Political Science Review by Joshua Kalla and David E. Broockman. From the Abstract:

Significant theories of democratic accountability hinge on how political campaigns affect Americans’ candidate choices. We argue that the best estimate of the effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candidates choices in general elections is zero. First, a systematic meta-analysis of 40 field experiments estimates an average effect of zero in general elections. Second, we present nine original field experiments that increase the statistical evidence in the literature about the persuasive effects of personal contact 10-fold. These experiments’ average effect is also zero. In both existing and our original experiments, persuasive effects only appear to emerge in two rare circumstances. First, when candidates take unusually unpopular positions and campaigns invest unusually heavily in identifying persuadable voters. Second, when campaigns contact voters long before election day and measure effects immediately — although this early persuasion decays. These findings contribute to ongoing debates about how political elites influence citizens’ judgments.

People (and children) are not blank slates. Media has only a small influence of personal choices. People are excellent pattern detectors and the associative patterns that they make are the product of their experience of reality and not originating from media consumption, social engineering, or innate bias.

That's all pretty good news.