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Sociology Student: Skin Tone and Textbooks

sociology student: The experience in 2012 led the sociology student who was studying at the University of British Columbia at the time to analyze faces in four textbooks widely used in North American medical schools, according to CTV. She concluded in an honours thesis that racial diversity was being ignored. She wondered if medical textbooks would also reflect what she considered to be a biased portrayal of Canada's diverse population. Most images in medical books are of legs, arms and chests, showing only skin tone, not race, so Louie broadened her research as a master's student at the University of Toronto and focused on skin tone in over 4,000 images in later versions of the same textbooks. Atlas had fewer than one per cent of photos featuring dark skin, while the highest amount -- five per cent -- was included in Gray's, the researchers say in the study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine. The study by Louie and co-author Rima Wilkes, a sociology professor at the University of British Columbia, found the proportion of dark skin tones represented was very small in images featured in Atlas of Human Anatomy, Bates' Guide to Physical Examinations and History Taking, Clinically Oriented Anatomy and Gray's Anatomy for Students. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.