ERIC Number: EJ1257949
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2020-May
Pages: 4
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0031-921X
EISSN: N/A
Physics Textbooks from 1960-2016: A History of Gender and Racial Bias
Lawlor, Timothy M.; Niller, Timothy
Physics Teacher, v58 n5 p320-323 May 2020
A large compendium of works on bias in education and textbooks, including in science, was published in the 2012 book "The New Politics of the Textbook." Of particular interest is a chapter by Ceglie and Olivares in which they discuss and tabulate gender and race in images for two high school biology textbooks. They found a lack of diversity in images, both containing more than 50% White images; however, female images outnumbered male images in both cases. This is interesting considering that biology is one of the few STEM fields in which women earn the majority of bachelor's degrees. Another work that specifically addresses images in textbooks includes Louiea and Wilkes, who found that images of different races were distributed comparable to the U.S. population in top medical school textbooks, though they found that light skin tone made up a large majority. And Morgan et al. found that images were split evenly between males and females in 10 medical school texts, though they identify other serious gender related problems. So far as the authors can tell, no study has been done specifically for university physics textbooks, a field in which women and ethnic or racial minorities are significantly underrepresented. In this paper, they find that the distribution of images in 11 physics textbooks over a wide range of years is not favorable to women and ethnic or racial minorities.
Descriptors: Textbook Evaluation, Physics, Educational History, Gender Bias, Racial Bias, Visual Aids
American Association of Physics Teachers. One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740. Tel: 301-209-3300; Fax: 301-209-0845; e-mail: pubs@aapt.org; Web site: http://aapt.scitation.org/journal/pte
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A