Fig 1.
Stylized representations of traditional and humanised powerpoint slide designs.
A: Traditionally formatted scientific slide, with author information presented only as a formal citation. B: Humanised slide, with photographs and full names of authors provided to give more explicit representation of author identity. Stylized slide presented for a fictional citation, dataset, and author list; note that real lecture slides included photographs rather than the cartoon style representations shown here.
Table 1.
Survey population and response rates.
Table 2.
Participant demographics.
Fig 2.
Assumptions of author identity around gender, location, ethnicity, and age made from a Harvard style reference.
The bias responses (e.g. male, white, Western, old) are presented in blue, reverse-bias responses (e.g. female, Black/Asian, non-Western, young) in orange. Diversity aware responses are those where students either presented different interpretations considering multiple diverse identities or actively said that one could not infer this information from the citation.
Fig 3.
Breakdown of responses to Harvard style reference by participant gender (A-D) and participant ethnicity (E-H). NB = Non-binary, BAME = Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic. The implicit bias responses (e.g. male, white, Western-centric, old) are presented in blue, reverse-bias responses (e.g. female, Black/Asian, non-Western, young) in orange. Diversity aware responses are those where students actively said that one could not infer this information from the citation.
Fig 4.
Participant perceptions on whether the ‘humanised’ slide design impacted their perception of diversity in science, broken down by gender and ethnic group of the participant.
NB = Non-binary, BAME = Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic.
Table 3.
Frequencies of sub themes within the explicit support for practice, presented by participant gender.
Fig 5.
Student perceptions on whether it is good practice to show headshots and full names of all scientists in lectures, according to the gender of the participant.
Annotation indicates the result of a Chi-square test to compare perceptions by gender. To avoid cell values smaller than five the ‘Not good practice’ and ‘Ambivalence’ categories were aggregated for the statistical analysis. Comparatively low representation of BAME participants mean the equivalent test for participant ethnic group was inappropriate but data are presented for interest.