Update: What does a scientist look like? Kids are drawing women more than ever!

A new study (published March 20, 2018 here and written up in Science here) demonstrated that when asked to draw a scientist, in the past decade, around 34% of children drew pictures of female scientists. This is in stark contrast to the 1960s and 70s, when children drew women less than 1% of the time. This follows an increase in the number of women in science, as well--representation matters! Now let's work on increasing the number of drawings that depict scientists as racial and ethnic minorities!

Read our original post on what Stanford penpals look like here. Our scientist penpals are deeply diverse, and we hope to teach our students that scientists come from all walks of life!

Photo credit: Vasilia Christidou