Review of the Picture a Scientist Documentary

A friend recently recommended a movie called Picture a Scientist. Picture a Scientist is an eye-opening documentary from 2020 that provides shocking insights into the careers of three women scientists, biologist Nancy Hopkins, chemist Raychelle Burks, and geologist Jane Willenbring, focusing on the hurdles and inequalities that they have faced as they try and do the thing that they all clearly love: research. However, it is 2022; surely these gender issues are in the past, and our young women scientists will not have to face this kind of bias, right? Unfortunately, there is a preponderance of evidence that this is not the case. Watch Picture a Scientist with your scientific colleagues to provide an avenue to open a dialogue about ongoing gender issues. I highly recommend this impactful documentary.

The film’s title can trace its origin in well-documented studies that when high school age students are asked to draw a picture of a scientist, they draw a man. (1) However, in certain STEM disciplines such as chemistry, close to 50% of undergraduate students are women, so there are clearly plenty of women in many, but not all, scientific majors at this level. The gender parity starts to erode at the postdoctoral level and continues to worsen through the academic ranks, with a much lower representation of women in STEM professorial roles. (2) Think back to your own college days. How many women professors did you have? Although less data is available, the situation is likely similar within the pharmaceutical industry, with fewer women scientists at the more senior levels. Picture a Scientist provides insight into the challenges and barriers faced by women in STEM fields that lead to the leaky pipeline, albeit with some very shocking examples. Nancy Hopkins crept around the laboratories at MIT in the middle of the night with a tape measure to collect data to show that women faculty were assigned less lab space than their male colleagues. In a historical outcome, MIT admitted that they discriminated against their women STEM faculty. (3) Jane Willenbring was subject to horrific misogynist verbal and physical abuse by her Ph.D. advisor, in particular during field trips to Antarctica. Several years later, her advisor was fired, after she filed a Title IX complaint. Unbelievably, a faculty committee, tasked with evaluating the case, merely recommended suspending the advisor; the University President stepped in and fired the advisor. Raychelle Burks becomes visibly upset in an interview as she details the insidious racial and gender bias that she has experienced as a chemistry faculty.

The examples provided by these heroic women, and I call them heroic because they had the courage to address and speak out about these issues, are only the tip of the iceberg, as elegantly pointed out in the documentary. Not all women scientists face obvious issues such as sexual harassment; instead, the discrimination faced by women scientists falls into the category of gender harassment, which includes behaviors that are hostile, or exclusionary, that treat women as second-class citizens, or objectify them. (4) In many cases, the issues faced by women scientists are much more subtle (Figure 1), such as being passed over as a collaborator despite being qualified or left off an email, and may result from the subconscious gender biases that we all possess.

Figure 1

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A memorable scene from Picture a Scientist involves a conversation between Nancy Hopkins and Mahzarin Banaji, a Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. The discussion centers on how to respond to male colleagues who state that they are convinced that they have never seen any bias against female scientists. The conclusion to the discussion is that the evidence of bias against women scientists is so clear that no one should rely on their own observations. Instead, do what scientists do and look at the data! Thus, the time has passed for colleagues to claim that there is not any bias just because they have not noticed it.