Cover illustration by Driti Wadwa
An informal discussion with a science educator friend a few years ago about entering a high-school classroom and conducting a social experiment asking students to “draw a scientist,” felt fascinating as a concept.
Both the activity and the outcome were a revelation each time I entered a new classroom. It has become my favorite icebreaker over time as I meet young students about to pick their majors.
The first experiment I facilitated was on a bright winter morning of January 2022 in Jharkhand, India. This memory is clear because after briefing the activity, a deafening silence followed for the next three or four minutes. A batch of around 90 boys and girls who were passionate about the science could not imagine one female scientist. I was heartbroken.
With time, more classrooms and more drawings contributed to the pile of white sheets on my study table. These “draw a scientist” pictures could easily be segregated into:
- Definitive male scientists drawn with curly hair, lab coats, and glasses, and/or
- Ambiguous male scientists with longer hair, shirts tucked into bell-bottom style pants, and a pen inside the small pocket on the left side of flat-chested upper body outlines.
I continued to be heartbroken until February 2025, on another bright morning inside a government school in Karnataka, India. There were more girls in this classroom, with a batch size of about 60, and roughly 10 boys in total.
Five hands raised when I asked, “Please raise your hands if your drawing/sketch looks anything different from a male or boy scientist.” One girl student had sketched a person in a ponytail and bangles, and another included shoulder-length curly hair, earrings, and a tiny black dot on the forehead. A true moment of delight was witnessing a female scientist in a burqa and a mask drawn by the third girl student. My “eureka moment” of hope!
The “draw a scientist” theory, when tested across different settings, tells one story in unison: the chances of students drawing female scientists are minimal. I take into account a dataset of about 5,000 students over the last three years who have participated in the experiment.
This story often reminds me of my high school when sciences were introduced to us. I don’t remember falling in love with the notions of science or the approach. Some of those moments also felt abnormal, as boys and girls were homogeneously grouped in different classrooms, as the biology topics of reproduction and anatomy were brushed past in a hurry.
It’s tough to deduce what has changed since then. However, my documentary-making journey about contemporary girl students of STEM, titled Sanrachna: Becoming Women in STEM, came alive in 2022. The project allowed me to go back to classrooms in India and attempt to discover the gendered biases as science subjects are introduced in high schools.
Much remains to be traversed, as amplifying young voices with storytelling becomes the hope towards equity. As a professor agreeably stated while I interviewed him for the documentary, “The first step is to acknowledge that there’s a problem.”
I imagine classrooms to be the canvases so the wings of imagination can draw STEM careers in all shades. Someday, the “draw a scientist” activity shall become redundant. Until then, our voices in science look for more classrooms they can echo in.
