Blog prompt 7

Describe your set of drawings and analyze the gender, age, facial expression, clothing, grooming, and physical characteristics of your scientists.  Pasted below are a few drawings from Seed magazine.  If your drawings are like these, then you probably have a bunch of older white males dressed in a lab coats with crazy hair.  But do these drawings really look like the scientists you know (consider your Ursinus professors in biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, psychology, etc.)?

In your blog post, consider whether your drawings reflect a certain stereotype about scientists, and why this stereotype not only might be bad for science but also might make your job as a science writer particularly difficult.  Finally, consider whether the general public’s mistrust in science we talked about a few weeks ago might not lie with science itself but rather with certain myths many of us have about scientists (e.g., “Scientists are not like us, so we shouldn’t trust them.” or “Scientists are dull, strange, and slightly inhuman; but that Jenny McCarthy – she is a mom who is caring and real.”)

In general, there are a number of substantial similarities that turn up when people are asked to draw or describe a scientist. The common factors are usually a white lab coat; messy, disheveled hair flying off in crazy directions, and glasses on a middle aged white male. That was the general subset of my results. Scientists can and do come from all backgrounds, cultures, walks of life and heritages, working at all ages and in every country. However, the majority of scientists in mainstream media are played by, portrayed by, or exemplified by males, generally middle aged white men. Edison, Einstein, and Tesla, are the three most famous non - fictional scientists of our age, and all of them can be described as... middle aged white men, with crazy, disheveled hair. But beyond the actual existences of well known scientists and inventors to not only rationalize, but proliferate the idea, in most fictional media, scientists, be they megalomaniacal geniuses hell bent on taking over the world, absent minded inventors who release a terror to plague the world, or valiant geniuses, creating technology on the level of Deus ex Machinae to save the day, all tend to have a few similarities in portrayal... most wear white lab coats. Many more have wild, disheveled hair, giving them the drawn out and expected scientist look. And one overriding factor tends to link them together; Nearly all of them are middle aged, white males. 

Media has a massive tendency to shape peoples expectations of professions and people, changing what we expect them to be and coloring our perceptions of what they actually are. Deep in our hearts, we expect scientists to be mad geniuses, laughing madly as lightning dances around them. We expect archaeologists to be whip wielding supermen, able to take on any foe and solve any problem dashingly. And because the reality pales, we stick to our illusions. This makes difficulties for both scientists and science writers, as the general populace tries to consider the work they are doing against a fictional matrix, expecting flying cars and hoverboards to be the reality that is created, rather than minor advances in improving efficiency of fuel cells, or oxygen production of algae. If we cant manage to make things that interesting, the public will be disappointed, less interested, and more likely to just drop the article and move on to the funny pages. That stereotype make people tend to disregard science, or brush it off as "just one of those things". And we as science writers, if we only assume that reliable or interesting scientific developments and information are going to come from middle aged white men in lab coats with crazy hair, then we cut out a sizeable portion of the scientists in the world, and for all we know could be taking scientific policy advice from a mental patient. 

Its entirely possible that our media fueled expectations that all scientists are Viktor Frankenstein style mad scientists shape our actual views on science as a whole, and perhaps even probable. But that shouldn't lead to a public perception of "scientists cannot be trusted because they aren't like us" or because they are "dull, strange, and slightly inhuman." There is no such thing as "normal" in this world - everyone is different and strange in their own ways. And at least to my point of view, its not scientists that cannot be trusted for the listed reasons, its celebrities like Jenny McCarthy. Scientists have far more in common with us regular people than celebrities out to "make a difference"... and gain themselves a great deal of publicity and public sympathy.