A textbook case: McDaniel professor studies inclusivity in STEMM
Groundbreaking research conducted by biochemist and Associate Professor of Chemistry Melanie Nilsson found gender and race imbalances in surveyed college-level chemistry textbooks, from the photographs to the referenced professionals.
"The best thing I can do with this phase of my career is to really focus on equity and inclusion in STEMM, because that’s what will help my students the most in the long run."
It was while reviewing general chemistry textbooks for curriculum adoption that Nilsson found a focus — one that had limited pre-existing research.
“I had a general chemistry textbook on my desk that was open to a page where there were two Black people in an image, and they were both athletes. And I wondered whether that was the only image of people of color in the book. As I flipped through, I found that there were very few others,” she says. “Then I pulled another textbook off the shelf and just casually flipped through. And I was like, ‘This one’s terrible, too.’”
Textbooks, Nilsson says, define — with a significant amount of authority — a discipline and its related professions for students. They can convey conscious or unconscious biases held by authors and publishers to students considering pathways in those fields and impact their ideas of what is achievable.
Gender Bias in Chemistry Textbooks
So, Nilsson decided to do what all good scientists do: a systematic study. With co-author Mona Becker — a former faculty member and department chair of Environmental Studies and current mayor of Westminster — Nilsson took a quantitative look at the gender inclusivity of chemistry textbooks.
The results of that study, “College Chemistry Textbooks Fail on Gender Representation,” were published in the Journal of Chemical Education in February 2021.
“For the gender study, I expected the books to be kind of bad, but they were far worse than we anticipated. Far worse,” Nilsson says.
When Nilsson and Becker surveyed 10 general chemistry textbooks published between 2016 and 2020, they found that women were in an average of 30% of the images and 3% of named STEMM professionals. To put it another way, a male name appears on average every four pages of text, while a female name only appears every 250 pages of text.
Nilsson and Becker compared their results to a similar study on chemistry textbooks from 1978-87. They determined that, based on female representation in images, current college chemistry textbooks in the U.S. resemble high school textbooks from the late 1970s and early 1980s. A lag time of 40 years.
Nilsson and Becker were also able to determine that “male overrepresentation is not driven by a pedagogical need to include specific individuals, since the textbooks only have eight names in common,” out of an average of 97 names per textbook.
Among the eight names, which include prominent scientists like Linus Pauling and Robert Boyle, many have a record of racist or misogynistic views that typically aren’t acknowledged in the text.
“What does the inclusion of that small group say about our discipline?” Nilsson says.
Putting Research into Action
While the quantitative study provided clear data about an imbalance in representation, Nilsson didn’t want that information to get “lost in the ether.”
“So, I sat down and wrote an email to every single textbook author and every single publisher that had a book in the study,” she says.
She was inspired to do so by the concept of “intellectual activism,” coined by sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, which encourages scholars to make actionable change through their research. “It’s about the many ways that we take our scholarship and move it toward social justice,” says Nilsson.
The responses to her outreach, she says, were eye-opening.
“We hope to dissuade publishers and authors from highlighting people who, if a student were to look into them, they would find someone who doesn’t believe they should have a fulfilling life or even basic human rights.”
“Students are the prospective future practitioners. For them, textbooks provide a glimpse into the scientific community: who is valued, how status is achieved and measured, what are the core values.”
