Diversifying STEM: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender

By William H. Robinson, Lorenzo DuBois Baber, Robbin Chapman and 20 more

2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Research frequently neglects the important ways that race and gender intersect within the complex structural dynamics of STEM. Diversifying STEM fills this void, bringing together a wide array of perspectives and the voices of a number of multidisciplinary scholars. The essays cover three main areas: the widely-held ideology that science and mathematics are “value-free,” which promotes pedagogies of colorblindness in the classroom as well as an avoidance of discussions around using mathematics and science to promote social justice; how male and female students of color experience the intersection of racist and sexist structures that lead to general underrepresentation and marginalization; and recognizing that although there are no quick fixes, there exists evidence-based research suggesting concrete ways of doing a better job of including individuals of color in STEM. As a whole this volume will allow practitioners, teachers, students, faculty, and professionals to reimagine STEM across a variety of educational paradigms, perspectives, and disciplines, which is critical in finding solutions that broaden the participation of historically underrepresented groups within the STEM disciplines. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781978805699

Book preview

Diversifying STEM

Diversifying STEM

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender

EDITED BY EBONY O. MCGEE AND WILLIAM H. ROBINSON

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McGee, Ebony O., 1973– editor. | Robinson, William H., 1973– editor.

Title: Diversifying STEM : multidisciplinary perspectives on race and gender / edited by Ebony O. McGee and William H. Robinson.

Description: New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059654| ISBN 9781978805675 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978805682 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Science—Study and teaching—Social aspects. | Mathematics—Study and teaching—Social aspects. | Minorities in science. | Women in science. | Minorities in mathematics. | Women in mathematics. | African Americans—Education. | Minorities—Education. | Women—Education. | Educational equalization.

Classification: LCC Q181 .D525 2019 | DDC 507.1/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059654

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2020 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2020 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Introduction

EBONY O. MCGEE AND WILLIAM H. ROBINSON

Part I: The Structural Dynamics of STEM

1. Color-Blind Liberalism in Postsecondary STEM Education

LORENZO DUBOIS BABER

2. Rendering the Invisible Visible: Student Success in Exclusive Excellence STEM Environments

ROBBIN CHAPMAN

3. Show Me Your Papers: When Racism and Sexism Trump Credibility in STEM

MONICA F. COX

Part II: The Impact of Race and Gender on Scholars of Color in STEM

4. Cartographies of Race, Gender, and Class in the White (Male Settler) Spaces of Science and Mathematics: Navigations by Black, Afro-Brazilian, and Pakistani/American Womxn

KRYSTAL MADDEN, PRISCILA PEREIRA, SARA REZVI, VICTORIA F. TRINDER, AND DANNY BERNARD MARTIN

5. A Critical Examination of the Influence of Systemic Racism in Shaping the African STEM Research Workforce

JOMO W.MUTEGI

6. They Shall Not Be Moved: Black Students’ Persistence as Engineering Majors

DORINDA J. CARTER ANDREWS

7. Determinants of Mental Health and Career Trajectories: Rationale and Design of the Engineering and Computing Doctoral Experiences Survey (ECDES)

EBONY O. MCGEE, WILLIAM H. ROBINSON, DARA NAPHAN-KINGERY, STACEY HOUSTON II, AND GABRIELA LEÓN-PÉREZ

Part III: The Way Forward for Students, Faculty, and Institutions: Strategies for STEM Success

8. Lessons from PreK–12 to Support Black Students in STEM Higher Education

H. RICHARD MILNER IV AND ABIOLA FARINDE-WU

9. Black Males’ STEM Experiences: Factors That Contribute to Their Success

CHRISTOPHER C. JETT AND JULIUS DAVIS

10. Understanding Barriers to Diversifying STEM through Uncovering Ideological Conflicts

LINDSAYBROWN, ALISSA M. MANOLESCU, LAURA PROVOLT, ASPEN ROBINSON, AND KECIA M. THOMAS

11. Next Steps: Not Easy but Quite Necessary Solutions for a More Equitable STEM Learning Experience

EBONY O. MCGEE AND WILLIAM H. ROBINSON

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Diversifying STEM

Introduction

EBONY O. MCGEE AND WILLIAM H. ROBINSON

Diversity: Those differences that carry social and historical significance in the modern world.

—Kecia M. Thomas, Ph.D., professor and senior associate dean, University of Georgia

The traditional discussion of the need to diversify the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) often starts with the assumption of a crisis-level shortage of White male U.S. citizens (and their Asian male counterparts) that could be filled with women, minoritized people of color, and international students to maintain the nation’s competitive standing in STEM. As such, minoritized people of color who participate in STEM are positioned as replacements in the mostly White STEM professoriate and workforce. Furthermore, typical arguments for diversifying STEM claim that greater diversity in collaborations results in greater innovation and more creative, groundbreaking solutions because people of diverse backgrounds approach problems differently and engage in constructive debates (Dezsö & Ross, 2012; Hong & Page, 2004; Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999; Richard, 2000). This perspective maintains that the overwhelming uniformity of the U.S. STEM workforce (84 percent are White or Asian men) jeopardizes national scientific and technical achievement (Ashcraft & Breitzman, 2012; National Science Foundation, 2018) and positions minoritized people of color as an untapped resource that can be used to remedy the lack of diverse perspectives that plagues STEM fields (Metcalf, 2010).

Widespread arguments for broadening participation in STEM fields that treat underrepresented groups as an untapped resource with value added warrant critique because they promote the advancing of minoritized groups in STEM in order to improve industry bottom lines and the nation’s competitiveness (Baber, 2015). But diversifying STEM is important beyond the top-down approach that focuses on the interests of STEM industries and what the nation can derive from broadened participation. Diversifying STEM affects individuals who have been marginalized in their attempts to receive training in science and engineering, and it enables them to have successful careers that align with their abilities and interests.

Although the nation continues to diversify both culturally and ethnically, and educational institutions are tasked with preparing students to thrive in our increasingly diverse nation (Smith & Schonfeld, 2000), minoritized communities continue to be excluded, oppressed, and marginalized in higher education and in U.S. society generally (Bonilla-Silva, 2001; Peña, 2012). Racial and gender diversity are lacking at all levels of the U.S. education system and workforce. Statistics on the racial and ethnic diversity of teachers in our nation’s K–12 public school systems show that although non-White students accounted for more than 50 percent of all public school students in 2014 (National Science Foundation, 2017), roughly 84 percent of K–12 teachers were White women (Feistritzer, Griffin, & Linnajarvi, 2011). Such racial disparities are also reflected in postsecondary degree attainment. In 2014, African Americans comprised 12.4 percent of the overall U.S. population but less than 4 percent of all students graduating with an engineering degree at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels (National Science Foundation, 2017). In the same year, women represented less than 24 percent of all students who earned undergraduate and graduate engineering degrees (National Science Foundation, 2017). In 2015, African American graduate students were the most underrepresented of all racial and ethnic groups at research universities with very high research activity—the institutions with the largest research infrastructure and level of support for graduate students (Okahana, Feaster, & Allum, 2016).

Among professors of undergraduate and graduate education, the proportion of Black engineering and computing faculty has remained at about 2.5 percent over a ten-year period (Yoder, 2015; Robinson, McGee, Bentley, & Houston, 2015) while the proportion of women faculty increased from 11 percent in 2006 to 17 percent in 2017 (Yoder, 2017). Disproportionality also characterizes the engineering industry, as shown in a recent study by Baker, Dunnavant, and McNair (2015). Among the eleven largest Silicon Valley companies, which employ the upper echelon of engineers in the United States, only three companies have reached degree parity for their Black employees in technical departments (i.e., the proportion of Black employees reflects the proportion of Black degree recipients in the United States). Only one of these three companies, Hewlett-Packard, has reached population parity, in which the proportion of Black employees reflects the proportion of Black U.S. citizens (Baker, Dunnavant, & McNair, 2015). With regard to women, only two companies reached degree parity, and none reached population parity in their technical departments. Such incongruity of access to science and engineering education and employment does not occur in a social vacuum; rather, it is the result of multifaceted, sociohistorical legacies of power and privilege.

Research has demonstrated that U.S. universities are plagued with numerous institutional challenges that impede the broadening of participation by underrepresented minoritized (URM) students in STEM: (1) too few students, K–12 teachers, and faculty of color in the STEM disciplines, a situation fueled by institutional and social barriers in the academy (Turner, González, & Wood, 2008); (2) URM students’ difficulty with envisioning themselves as part of the STEM workforce in the face of racially charged STEM academic environments (Gibbs, McGready, Bennett, & Griffin, 2014; Gibbs, McGready, & Griffin, 2015); (3) unwelcoming institutional and educational climates in STEM (Ong, Wright, Espinosa, & Orfield, 2011); (4) racial/ethnic stereotyping (Malone & Barabino, 2009; McGee & Martin, 2011); and (5) the revolving door syndrome of URM K–12 teachers and faculty who can serve as role models for students of color (Eagan & Garvey, 2015; Zambrana et al., 2015).

To illustrate what a Black engineering student in the United States today might experience, let us take the example of Samuel (a pseudonym) as he reflects on his experiences in a doctoral engineering program as part of a qualitative study we conducted (Robinson et al., 2015; Robinson et al., 2016). When asked for his thoughts about the lack of racial diversity among engineering faculty, he said, As far as a way of getting people to want to be faculty, people in general go where they’re wanted, where they feel like they’re wanted. So as a student, if you have a bad experience and you don’t feel like your presence is even wanted, never mind improving the situation, you want out of the environment, because it’s toxic. So take a person like me—I could do a lot of good around here. I don’t want to be here. Not because I don’t want to do any good, [but] because this has been damaging to my psyche.

Black doctoral students who have shared their stories with us echo Samuel’s message: becoming a member of the academic faculty community necessitates positive reinforcement throughout one’s academic training. When students such as Samuel have the ability to be engineering professors but cannot envision themselves as belonging to the profession due to an unwelcoming and racially charged environment, they often leave academia. Together, the authors of the present volume expand this general concept by explaining how students with nonnormative identities in STEM educational contexts are miseducated and made to feel that they do not belong. As these authors critique the institutional structures that lead to disparities in STEM persistence, they examine both the negative and positive roles that institutions, educators, colleagues, and peers play in the critical educational experiences of Black students.

The lack of diversity in the STEM academic and industry workforce (i.e., in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and disability status in disciplines that train students to participate in the STEM workforce) requires researchers who specialize in racism, sexism, and other forms of bias to be part of the discussion and search for solutions. Research on diversity in STEM frequently neglects how race and gender intersect within the complex structural dynamics of STEM. Much more often, such research has focused solely on gendered experiences within STEM, thus ignoring the experiences of many students who are affected through both race and gender. Our edited volume, Diversifying STEM: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender, serves as an extended discussion of the foundational concepts of our research group, the Explorations in Diversifying Engineering Faculty Initiative (EDEFI; pronounced edify). The authors who contributed to this volume address the topical void in the literature by using research expertise from multiple disciplines of STEM education. Their scholarship includes race, culture, and social stratification; social justice in education; the affirmative personal and academic development of Black men and boys; mathematical and racial identity; racial socialization processes; and race and gender intersectionality. These multidisciplinary scholars offer a wide array of perspectives. Our hopes are that this volume will allow practitioners, teachers, students, faculty, and professionals to reimagine STEM across a variety of educational paradigms, perspectives, and disciplines, which is critical to finding solutions that broaden the participation of historically underrepresented groups within the STEM disciplines.

The Purpose of the Book

Much of STEM research is reductionist and isolated within individual scholarly domains. Education scholars have produced valuable work offering suggestions for the improvement of deeply entrenched issues. Sociologists have long focused on understanding the social-structural constraints within which educational institutions operate. Psychologists have traditionally focused on mental health implications of discrimination or schemas regarding potential for success. Our book integrates sociological and psychological elements into this educational issue and uniquely offers multidisciplinary perspectives on two levels. First, each author incorporates elements of multiple fields into her or his analysis. Second, in their aggregate, the voices of these experts from several disciplines provide a well-rounded picture of the way STEM disciplines operate from a variety of perspectives. Each work presented in this volume complements the other contributions, producing a strong framework through which to understand STEM education for URM groups. This approach is vital for envisioning the ways in which diversity in the STEM disciplines can feasibly be improved to achieve racial equity, thereby increasing opportunities for creativity and innovation for individuals who have been marginalized.

A related shortcoming of previous research on diversity in STEM is the lack of intersectional approaches. Important research has focused primarily on race or gender, but a well-rounded mix of intersectional research is lacking. While many studies have begun either to statistically control for race while examining gender or to control for gender while examining race, these approaches ignore the fact that each of us has multiple identities and thus experiences multiple forms of marginality. In order to adequately address the multidimensional, systemic injustice that is present in STEM, an interdisciplinary, intersectional approach is fundamental.

Forming the Collaboration of Engineering and Social Science

Both the collaboration for EDEFI and this edited volume were founded on the individual experiences in STEM of Ebony O. McGee and William H. Robinson. Our work has been influenced by our mutual research on the perspectives of marginalized students who have experienced obstacles during their STEM education.

About Ebony O. McGee

Although Ebony O. McGee’s bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and her master’s degree in industrial engineering are almost a generation old, and much has changed in that time, today’s students of color continue to grapple with racialized experiences that burden their efforts to pursue a STEM degree. For women of color, racism and sexism further magnify their difficulties in the field. McGee’s research focuses on (1) the role of racialized experiences and race-gender bias in STEM educational and career achievement, (2) problematizing traditional notions of academic achievement, and (3) what it means to be successful in STEM yet marginalized. This marginalization creates racialized residue that students of color must carry with them and manage throughout their STEM education and careers. While McGee’s PhD is in mathematics education, in order to gain a holistic understanding of the experiences of students and faculty of color, she had to familiarize herself with a wide range of perspectives on race, ethnicity, and social inequalities in STEM. Thus, her research evolved into cross-disciplinary examinations that link theory and methodology from fields as diverse as cultural psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, wellness, and mental/physical health.

In 2012, McGee joined the Vanderbilt University faculty as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning of Peabody College. In 2016, she became the first African American female faculty member promoted to associate professor with tenure in the history of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College (Dr. Rich Milner, an author in this volume, was the first African American faculty member promoted to tenured associate professor in 2008). McGee was recently awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER award to examine ways to broaden participation in engineering and computing through a multitiered research design that studies how race-related bias and microaggressive acts affect the STEM trajectories of historically marginalized doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers.

About William H. Robinson

William H. Robinson once heard a keynote talk given by Dr. John Brooks Slaughter, the former president and CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. In that speech, Dr. Slaughter said, Minority students suffer from the absence of minority role models in the classroom, but too few minority students are encouraged and guided into graduate education so that they can ultimately become faculty members who can inspire and educate even more minority students. Despite growing up in a family of educators, Robinson had never considered college professor as a career choice. That changed at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, when as an undergraduate student he met Dr. Reginald J. Perry and Dr. Roderick D. Wilson, two African American professors in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Having African American role models gave Robinson the confidence to pursue his PhD in electrical engineering and to seek a university faculty position. While in graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he also received valuable mentorship from two other African American faculty members, Dr. Gary S. May and Dr. Mark J. T. Smith. In 2003, Robinson joined the Vanderbilt faculty as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is the first African American faculty member promoted to associate professor with tenure (in 2010) and, with his most recent promotion (in 2018), the first African American full professor in the history of Vanderbilt’s School of Engineering. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Academic and Research Leadership Network (https://www.arlnetwork.org/). This network works with minority engineers in academia, industry, and government laboratories whose careers involve a strong focus on research, to prepare them for leadership and success in their chosen discipline.

About EDEFI

We came together with EDEFI because we see the problem of recruiting and retaining Black engineering faculty (and Black STEM faculty in general) as a multifaceted challenge that must counter the inertia of the status quo. The mission of EDEFI is to investigate the institutional, technical, social, and cultural factors that affect decision-making, career choices, and career satisfaction for engineering and computing doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty who have been marginalized by race and/or gender. EDEFI also examines how those factors contribute to the current underrepresentation of these marginalized groups in engineering and computing faculty positions. Our research has identified barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, social class, sexual orientation, culture, and language that riddle the educational system and deprive some students and faculty of full participation in STEM. Our findings indicate that the pathway to success for students of color remains troubled, even for those at the top of the STEM academic ladder. To unpack the racialized experiences of STEM students of color, we have drawn on several theoretical constructs, including critical race theory (CRT), racial microaggressions, impostor syndrome, and social cognitive career theory. These frameworks have added much-needed depth to our conceptual tools for describing the totality of racialized and race-gender experiences affecting STEM students and faculty.

Organization of the Book

The book’s division into three parts allows the reader to gain a sense of the structures of racism and the intersectionality of racism and sexism facing STEM students of color; how they contend with these structures; and what institutions, departments, and professors can do to (a) improve the experiences of students of color in STEM and (b) encourage their representation and persistence. The authors in part I discuss the widely held ideology that science and mathematics are completely objective and value-free, which promotes pedagogies of colorblindness in the classroom and an avoidance of discussions around using mathematics and science to promote social justice. Part II focuses on how male and female students of color experience—both interpersonally and psychologically—the intersection of racist and sexist structures that lead to general underrepresentation and marginalization. The chapters in part III present evidence-based research that suggests concrete ways of doing a better job of including people of color in STEM.

PART I: THE STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS OF STEM

Because racism has individual and institutional components, these chapters consider the racialized assumptions, policies, and practices embedded in academia as well as individual acts of bias and racism that affect underrepresented students of color in STEM more directly. Attributing the systemic nature of a racialized educational setting to just a few bad actors only exacerbates the manifestations of racism. Thus, this thematic section interrogates the ideologies related to colorblindness and meritocracy—which diminish or negate the realities of systemic racism—and exemplify how structural racism can manifest in educational spaces in general and STEM spaces in particular. Our contributors identify structural racism as systemic by foregrounding the reality of the United States’ racialized systems, wherein economic, political, social, ideological, and educational dynamics routinely advantage Whites while producing chronically adverse outcomes for nondominant racial and ethnic groups. These chapters also highlight structural challenges associated with racism, sexism, and race-gender bias that impinge on the experiences of URM students in STEM.

Part I contains three chapters. In Color-Blind Liberalism in Postsecondary STEM Education, Baber analyzes the structuration of systemic racism in postsecondary STEM education. In Rendering the Invisible Visible: Student Success in Exclusive Excellence STEM Environments, Chapman confronts problematic institutional spaces by focusing on the imperative, and often invisible, role of institutions in maintaining inequities that compromise URM student success. In Show Me Your Papers: When Racism and Sexism Trump Credibility in STEM, Cox analyzes literature regarding the experiences of women faculty of color in STEM through the lens of a birther metaphor.

PART II: THE IMPACT OF RACE AND GENDER ON SCHOLARS OF COLOR IN STEM

Negative societal forces frequently discourage scholars who have the potential to excel in science and engineering and join academia (Robinson et al., 2015; Robinson et al., 2016). These authors use race and gender frameworks to consider how students cope with racial and gender stereotypes and other forms of bias while maintaining varying levels of achievement in STEM disciplines. Frameworks include CRT, tokenism, Black feminism/womanism, racial microaggressions, John Henryism, stress and strain frames, and racial battle fatigue. The frameworks are used to explore historical and contemporary practices as well as institutional and social barriers that have negatively affected Black students in STEM, such as unwelcoming institutional climates, racial/ethnic stereotyping, a lack of a critical mass of STEM faculty of color, a lack of role models or mentors in STEM, and high numbers of URM students dropping out of STEM disciplines.

In Cartographies of Race, Gender, and Class in the White (Male Settler) Spaces of Science and Mathematics: Navigations by Black, Afro-Brazilian, and Pakistani/American Womxn, Madden and colleagues explore the particular ways in which three women in STEM, who identify as Pakistani, African American, and Afro-Brazilian, narrate and map out their experiences as doctoral students in the contexts of race, class, gender, place, and other relevant considerations. In A Critical Examination of the Influence of Systemic Racism in Shaping the African American STEM Research Workforce, Mutegi uses an in-depth, first-person narrative of a STEM doctoral student to understand the connection between systemic racism and why STEM looks and functions the way it currently does for African Americans in the STEM research workforce. In "They Shall Not Be Moved: Black Students’