Are copywriters male or female?

There's an interesting test in the scientific world called Draw An Engineer (DAET), which I came across via Dr Tim Minshall at our TEDxGranta event a couple of years back.

Primary school children are asked to draw a picture of an engineer, which gives us an insight into the way the next generation perceive the people who follow this career path.

He found that, "Almost all of them showed men and spanners and hammers, fixing broken-down cars and trains."

This despite the fact that a healthy proportion of people in science, technology and engineering are women and they all do a lot more than just bashing things with hammers. Or so they tell me.

These findings came to mind recently after three unrelated conversations with people who defaulted to 'he' when talking about copywriters. 

I thought this a bit odd. I class myself as a copywriter and I'm female. I'm part of lots of communities of copywriters – on Twitter, LinkedIn, the Professional Copywriters' Network and in the offline world with colleagues I've worked with over the years. Without doing a painstaking assessment of the gender split, it feels pretty much 50:50.

I would welcome thoughts on this.  If I asked you to draw a picture of a copywriter, what would you come up with? 

[Photo credit: Anita Peppers]