Goal

The goal of this activity is to reflect upon gender stereotypes in STEM professions and stimulate a reflection upon the presence of biases in the way people perceive some professions. To support this process, we propose a simple activity aimed at supporting awareness and reflection around our own preconceptions.

Activity structure

The activity consists of three steps. The first one is individual: each participant should reflect and look for images on the internet of three given STEM professions. The second step, also individual, is aimed at stimulating the observation of how people previously enrolled in the course had represented those professions to highlight the presence or absence of gender biases. The final step is collective: the participants will be asked to share their opinion about the activity outputs. The discussion will be hosted by the Forum page of this course.

Let's now see more in details how each step works. You need an image search engine and a physical or virtual notepad for this activity.

Step 1 - Explore your bias

  • Scientist, engineer, technician: reflect on each of the following professions and note down which are the first images that come to your mind.
  • Use the image search engine to find the 2-3 images per each profession that best match what you pictured in your mind.
  • After having found the images, write down a very short definition of each of the three professions, i.e. scientist, engineer and technician.

Step 2 - Take a look!

You can now explore some of the visualization and descriptions of the same three professions developed by participants of past editions of this course. These have been created by using the platform MyBias (available in previous editions) developed by a student at Politecnico di Milano in 2017 (Mattioli, 2017; Mattioli, Ferraris, & Ferraro, 2018; Mattioli, Ferraris, Ferraro, et al., 2018).

In this edition, you have been invited, in the previous step of this activity, to use common image search engines to verify which are the most widespread images of these three professions online (scientist, engineer, technician).

   Take a look at the Biascards about STEM professions

Mattioli, F. (2017). Cross-cultural design teamwork and designer’s bias. How to improve collaboration among designers coming from different cultures. Politecnico di Milano.

Mattioli, F., Ferraris, S. D., & Ferraro, V. (2018). Mybias. A Web-Based Tool to Overcome Communication Issues and Foster Creativity in Heterogeneous Design Teams. In E. Bohemia, A. Kovacevic, L. Buck, P. Childs, S. Green, A. Hall, & A. Dasan (Eds.), DS 93: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE 2018), Dyson School of Engineering, Imperial College, London. 6th - 7th September 2018 (pp. 271–276). Institution of Engineering Designers, The Design Society.     Link

Mattioli, F., Ferraris, S. D., Ferraro, V., & Rampino, L. (2018). Mybias. A Web-Based Tool to Overcome Designers’ Biases in Heterogeneous Design Teams. In C. Storni, K. Leahy, M. McMahon, P. Lloyd, & E. Bohemia (Eds.), Proceedings of DRS 2018, Design as a Catalyst for Change, Vol. 3, University of Limerick, Ireland, 25-28 June 2018 (Vol. 3, pp. 1102–1115).     Link

Step 3 - Discussion time   

  • Share with other participants your opinion about the activity outputs in the Forum of the course.