What does a scientist look like? In the media, scientists are stereotypically shown as white and male. There is a famous experiment where you ask a class of children to draw a scientist to see how common this stereotype is. In the 60’s and 70’s only 1% of students draw scientists as female (According to Science.org), but increasingly children are drawing more female scientists, and in some studies over half have drawn women.

I do this in my first lecture with my student teachers every year, and the number of female scientists being drawn is increasing, but is still in the minority. There are often lots of bunsen burners, odd chemicals and things exploding.

Doing a Google Image Search for “A scientist” has also got better over the years. With a more diverse view of scientists being returned. As teachers it’s up to us to try and promote a more diverse view of science so children can see themselves as scientists – it shouldn’t just be about bald white men in lab coats.

With the rise of all the AI image generation tools recently, I was curious what AI would come up with when asked purely to “draw a scientist”. So I asked it.

I’ve been using Adobe Firefly a lot, as it’s free.

So I gave it the simple prompt of “Draw a Scientist”. And here are the results:

So two male, two female scientists. All white. All in lab coats with glasses. Some worryingly levitating bottles of blue chemicals too.

I asked it again and the results were pretty cool. Without any other prompt it draw four female scientists, two black, two white. But labcoats, glasses and odd blue liquids still there.

Asking it for photographs of scientists gave another group of white people in lab coats, one woman. Only two wearing glasses this time.

It’s clear that the AI is biased towards showing white men when given such as basic prompt, but it does seem to try and build in a little diversity.

It’s clear that with AI, the key is in the prompt that you put in. Which would be the same with a class of kids. If I asked them – draw me a range of scientists, multiethnic, male and female – then obviously they’d draw lots of different people. Which AI also does:

I also asked Ideogram.ai to “draw a scientist”. This was the results

And again with the “be diverse prompt”

Lots of white coats again!

It seems AI really wants to put scientists into white lab coats. Even if you explicitly ask it not to. Back to Adobe Firefly –

I really tried to get it to avoid puting them in a lab coat, even trying to specify biologists in the field. So it drew them in a field…

So I guess some stereotypes are hard to break at the moment. For now, if you want diverse scientists then you need to put a bit of work into the prompts that you use, which is the key to a lot of quality AI output right now.

If you’re interested in ways to promote diversity and break down the stereotypes in science, then check out this post.

If you’ve tried it, let me know in the comments how it went. Did you break the white coat curse?