College biology textbooks still portray a world of white scientists
Charles Darwin. Carolus Linneaus. Gregor Mendel. They’re all men. They’re all white. And their names appear in every biology book included in a new analysis of college textbooks. According to the survey, mentions of white men still dominate biology textbooks despite growing recognition in other media of the scientific contributions of women and people of color. The good news, the researchers say: Scientists in textbooks are getting more diverse. The bad news: If diversification continues at its current pace, it will take another 500 years for mentions of Black/African American scientists to accurately reflect the number of Black college biology students. “Biology is still a very white discipline, so the results were not incredibly surprising,” says Cissy Ballen, an education researcher at Auburn University in Alabama. By identifying scientist names and determining when their research was published, Ballen and her colleagues looked at trends in seven of the most commonly used college...