From the 1970s to 2019, the number of current college graduates has flipped from being 58 percent men to being 56 percent women.[2] However, the gender distribution is not uniform; while women receive 59 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the biological sciences, they receive only 40 percent of physical science and mathematics degrees and much less than 20 percent in the computer sciences and engineering.[3] Women make up half of the total U.S. college-educated workforce but only 29 percent of the science and engineering workforce. A 2017 National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics report shows that although white men make up only one-third of the U.S. population, they constitute at least half of all scientists.[4]
Scientists of Color
Although students from underrepresented groups aspire to careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields at the same rates as their nonminority peers, minorities, who comprise 30 percent of the U.S. population, make up only 14 percent of master’s students and just 6 percent of all PhD candidates.[5] This gap hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years.[6] In 2017, there were more than a dozen areas in which not a single PhD was awarded to a black person, primarily within the STEM fields.[7] There are many reasons for this. In a paper examining underrepresented minority participation in biomedical research and health fields, Rosalina James, a member of the University of Washington Bioethics and Humanities department, states, “Inadequate preparation is a major limiting factor in efforts to increase the pool of qualified minority applicants for advanced education. Poverty, sub-par resources in minority-serving schools and poor mentorship contribute to losses of minority students at each level of education.”[8] Stereotype threat,[9] impostor syndrome, and numerous microaggressions[10] also prevent scientists from minority groups from performing anywhere close to their potential.
According to a report by the American Institute for Research, a third of all black STEM PhDs earned their undergraduate degrees at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), institutions of higher education founded to serve primarily African American students.[11] Xavier University of Louisiana, located in New Orleans, is an HBCU and Catholic institution nationally recognized for its STEM programs. “Of the 3,231 students enrolled at Xavier in fall 2018, approximately 72 percent were African American, and about 79 percent of the 2,463 undergraduates majored in the biomedical sciences (bioinformatics, biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, data science, mathematics, neuroscience, physics, psychology, public health sciences, and sociology).”[12] Xavier is best known for its education in the health professions, and, according to 2018 Diverse Issues in Higher Education data, ranks second in the nation in the number of African Americans who earn bachelor’s degrees in the physical sciences and fourth in the number earning bachelor’s degrees in the biological and biomedical sciences.[13] A 2013 National Science Foundation report confirms Xavier’s success in educating science graduates, ranking Xavier first in the nation in producing African American graduates who go on to receive life sciences PhD degrees, fifth in producing African American graduates who go on to receive science and engineering PhD degrees, and seventh in producing African American graduates who go on to receive physical sciences PhD degrees.[14] The 2012 Report on Diversity in Medical Education published by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) ranks Xavier first in the number of African American alumni who successfully complete their medical degrees.[15] Xavier is one of 101 HBCUs in the United States. I went to visit Xavier to get the university’s perspective on minority representation in STEM fields and to see what it does so well.
In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced 10 BUILD (Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity) awards, ranging from $17 million to $24 million over five years. In his announcement of the awards, NIH director Francis Collins explained that the program was designed to increase the representation of African American, Hispanics, and Native Americans in science. Collins is particularly concerned because “although 12.6% of the U.S. population is African-American, only 1.1% of our NIH principal investigators are African-American.”[16] One of these awards, in the amount of $19.6 million, was presented to Xavier.
Professor Maryam Foroozesh is the chemistry department chair and the lead principal investigator of Xavier’s NIH BUILD award. Like Professor James, she feels the root of the problem is in K–12 education. The public school system needs serious improvement across the country. If we are all paying taxes, then every one of our children should have the right to the same type of education. The underrepresentation of students of color in the sciences is not due to their ability but to a lack of preparation and the reduced expectations that can come with an inferior education. “I think if there was a standard K through 12 national education program with federal oversight, then all the students including the ones from the inner cities or rural areas of the country would get a better education,” Foroozesh told me. “A federal education system would hopefully also address some of the diversity issues you see in science at the higher levels, because once you provide all the students in the U.S. with the education they deserve, then you would get a higher number of scientists coming out of the groups currently underrepresented in science.”
Foroozesh is also very concerned that the 116th Congress is extremely focused on short-term returns on their investments. They are pressuring funders to do short-term assessments, but it takes a long time to see the results of diversity programs. Increasing the diversity of the faculty and grant writers is a long-term project that involves K–12 reforms, changes in both undergraduate and graduate programs, and faculty hiring and retention. These factors are interlinked, and changes are difficult to evaluate because the numbers we are talking about are small. In 2012, 267 African Americans and 329 Hispanics received PhDs in the biological sciences. Even a small increase or drop can represent a large percentage change. Foroozesh worries that funding to programs that foster diversity and help STEM undergraduates from underrepresented groups are being cut before the programs have adequate time to prove their worth, which will disproportionally affect HBCUs that are highly reliant on them because they don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars in endowments.
There are many reasons students do not continue in STEM, and any one is sufficient to dissuade a student from persevering. Initial assessments of Xavier’s BUILD program have shown that mentorship is a major factor. Mentoring is crucial in retention of underrepresented students in STEM fields. Ideally the mentors need to serve as role models and have to understand the importance of cultural issues, family ties, financial needs, and expectations. Xavier’s researchers undergo special mentoring training to achieve this understanding.
Seventy-five percent of the undergraduates enrolled at Xavier in fall 2018 were African American women, most of whom were STEM majors. These women in STEM largely fell between two departments at the university. The chemistry department, the largest department at Xavier in the number of faculty and research staff and the second largest in the number of majors, has 28 faculty members, half of whom are women. Even though Xavier is an HBCU, the department only has six African American/black faculty (1 woman and 5 men). The biology department, the second largest department at Xavier based on the number of faculty members and the largest based on the number of majors, has 23 faculty members, 6 of whom are African American/black (4 women and 2 men). The causes for this disparity are systemic and have roots in retention and recruitment, as well as the small numbers of African Americans/blacks, especially women, looking for jobs in academia. Another chemistry faculty member, Professor Mehnaaz Ali, is a coprincipal investigator on a National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE grant, “which is focused on creating an equitable, inclusive and energizing climate for female