The Perceived Expectation of the Administrator as a Factor Affecting the Sex of Scientists Drawn by Early Adolescent Girls

Abstract

The postponement of drawing a female scientist until the male image has been presented, recently shown to occur in late primary‐school girl pupils, is confirmed for early teenage second‐level girl pupils. Making explicit the acceptability of either a male or female image reduced the level of such postponement to the extent that the proportions of the sexes drawn did not differ significantly between first and second drawings, although a tendency did remain for more female images to be presented in second drawings. The drawing by girls of exclusively male or exclusively female images of the scientist proved to reflect some construct other than that measured by Erb & Smith's ‘Women in Science Scale’. The incidence of drawing of female scientists by girls in this and previous Irish samples is noted to be much in excess of that recorded, mainly in North America, during the 1970s.