ABSTRACT
Working with some upper primary school and lower secondary pupils recently I asked them to draw a picture of a ‘Scientist’ and a picture of an ‘Engineer’. You can probably guess what the prevailing images were for the scientist: white, male, middle aged, balding, ‘mad’-haired and white-coated – a bit like the character ‘Doc’ in Back to the Future or the crazy scientist in Ben 10. Although there were some pictures of women too, again all were in white coats and wore glasses. And the engineer? Depicted as male, wearing a hard hat and carrying a larger-than-life spanner. Whilst accepting that the very act of asking for pictures to be drawn might have led them to offer me a caricature of how scientist and engineers are commonly represented in the media, despite the impetus over the years to broaden the appeal of the physical sciences, particularly to girls, it is perhaps still surprising how firm such stereotypical images are fixed in the public imagination.
