Diversity in SuperScience Magazine

June 12, 2018

Dear Ms. Romano,

After reading Gender and Race Representations of Scientists in Highlights for Children: A Content Analysis by Kathy K. Previs (Sagepub.com, 2012) as a SuperScience advisor, I wondered about the statement, “Girls lose interest in science by age 9, and researchers have attributed this finding to misrepresentations of female scientists in the media”. As I teach a diverse class of seventh graders, I wondered, would students lose interest in science if representations were biased or homogeneous?

I proposed the following question to my class. “Does SuperScience Magazine contain bias toward race and gender?” Here is what happened next according to the students.

Our seventh grade class from Vermont recently collected data about the gender and race representations of scientists in the SuperScience magazine. We are a class of 22 kids and we split up into groups of three or four to collect data on five different SuperScience magazines.

In groups of 3-4, we looked at 5 magazines dated from the newest edition, “Dreaming Big,” to a magazine dating back to March 2016, “Unlikely Pals”. While collecting data and analysing evidence here are some things we noticed:

May/June 2018- In this issue “we realized that only 2/9 scientists that you featured were female, which is a small number. And the only picture that we saw was a male.” Annie, Bevan, Riley

March 2018- “In this issue, we discovered that there were no named female scientists, and very few named people of color. The data showed that, in total, there were 6 named scientists, all of which were male, and 5 of which were white.” Gabbie, Corey, Matthew, Eli

February 2018- “We observed that in your images that feature people, of the race we reported, 4 out of 5 people where white. Additionally, there was only one non-white person who was profiled; Mohammed Rezwan, the engineer who designed a floating school in Bangladesh. He does not have a picture but we looked him up and found he was not white. In the pictures that had names of the person defined in the image, the person was white on all occasions. On the other hand we noticed that there was three females noted and two males noted.” Miranda, Saad, Josh, Luke

December 2017/January 2018- “We, as a group of three 7th graders from Shelburne Community School, believe that from evidence in the Dec 2017/Jan 2018 Super Science Article, that there is a overwhelmingly higher amount of male scientists than female scientists represented in this issue. Along with having 8 male scientists compared to the 4 female scientist, the female scientist is not showed in a photo while the 2 of the male scientists are shown in considerably large photos. We also have concerns about your representation of ethnic diversity. Out of the 12 scientists that you showed in this issue, only 3 were of minority.” Kate, PJ, Jack

May/June 2017- “Overall, of the 8 scientists mentioned in the issue, only 1 scientist can be seen as not white. In this issue, ⅞ of the scientists are white, which is a big majority.” Burgess, Abby, Gabe, Sasha

March 2016- “We collected data about the gender and race of scientists in the article. There are four pictures that were of male scientists. There were three pictures of female scientists. Eight of the scientists in the pictures were white. Based on this data, we came to the conclusion that this edition of SuperScience is not biased on the basis of gender but it is racially biased.” Marisa, Parker, Talulla

As a magazine, we know you need to consider what will interest kids and after looking up some statistics from the National Science Foundation, we also realize that scientists across fields are not balanced by gender or race either. Despite these facts, we believe that you should include more diversity with respect to gender and race in every issue of your magazine because the majority of the data that we took highlighted white males.

“A misrepresentation of scientists could affect the way that we look upon the career. If you do not see many people like you in a certain career, you might subconsciously start to think that it is not probable that the career in question is an option for you as well.” Gabbie Lindemyer

We believe that misrepresentation of race or gender can change the way that people think about themselves, in a positive or negative way. Since everyone should be given the opportunity to pursue science please consider implementing a process whereby the issues of SuperScience magazine are more balanced with respect to gender and racial diversity.