4 Obstacles keeping Women and People of Color out of STEM

Women and People of Color tend to be unrepresented in jobs relating to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. According to an article by Pew Research Center, Black and Hispanic Americans take up a smaller percent of STEM-based jobs then they do jobs overall, compared to White and Asian Americans who make up a larger percent of the STEM workforce then they do the general workforce. Women make up a large percentage of workers in STEM fields overall, at an average of about 50%, but their representation varies wildly depending on the field. 74% of jobs in healthcare related fields are occupied by women, but they take up only 25% of computing jobs and 15% of engineering positions. 

So what are the reasons for these diversity and inclusion barriers? While it would be too presumptuous to attempt a perfect, comprehensive explanation for why STEM fields are so disproportionate, the following list might point out some potential blockades that Women and People of Color face when trying to break into scientific fields.

1. Historically Substantiated Distrust of Medical Professionals

Starting in 1932, the US Public Health Service, in collaboration with the Tuskegee Institute,  conducted a study on 600 Black men from Macon County, Alabama, about half of whom had contracted Syphilis. The researchers offered Syphilis treatment to the men as a guise for conducting experiments on them, which involved painful procedures like spinal taps. These experiments continued for 40 years until an Associated Press story exposed the experiment in 1972. In the intervening period, the researchers had denied the men Penicillin as a treatment for fear of interference with the study results. 

The now infamous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” now stands as a keystone example of why Black Americans sometimes have less trust in physicians then White people. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research substantiates this connection, finding that “the disclosure of the study in 1972 is correlated with increases in medical mistrust and mortality and decreases in both outpatient and inpatient physician interactions for older black men.”

Poor treatment of Black patients isn’t a thing of the past either. Many Black patients report receiving less or no pain relieving care from doctors in situations where white patients would receive care. An article by The Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine details many of the racist biases that can get in the way of proper healthcare, including the pervasive belief that “black women are not credible witnesses to their own pain” or the stereotype that Black patients are somehow hardier than their White peers.

With this distrust and mistreatment in mind, it might make sense why some younger Black Americans would be discouraged from pursuing careers in medical or scientific careers in general. Granted, that is only speculation.

2. Misinformation Within STEM Education

STEM education itself often lacks oversight in regards to issues concerning women and People of Color. For example, a story from 2020 details how a medical student from St. Georges, University of London named Malone Mukwende had published a medical text concerning how certain symptoms look on non-white skin when he discovered that his college education was failing to provide that information. While the handbook, called “Mind the Gap”, is certainly a step in the right direction, there is definitely something distressing about the fact that it took until two years ago to publish one text on how to diagnose black and brown skin. 

Women in general are also often misdiagnosed during emergency room visits. While this is partially due to implicit bias, the more systematic issue is that women only make up about a third of subjects in medical trials. According to Reshma Jagsi, M.D., director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan, there’s a general idea in biological research that the average sized male works as a baseline model that women are a derivative of. Therefore, a lot of scientific trails operate on the assumption that findings in male subjects will also apply to female subjects. This expectation deviates heavily from reality, for example, women present different symptoms than men when having a heart attack, but many male doctors are only familiar with male symptoms such as shooting pain down the left arm.

3. Stereotypes In Stem

Existing expectations about who belongs in STEM fields are often too psychologically racing for Black and Hispanic students to handle.  Assistant Professor Ebony McGee from Vanderbilt University has spent over a decade studying what she calls “racial fatigue”, the experience that students “cannot shake the perception among certain white colleagues and collaborators that they don’t belong.” Superiors and colleagues of STEM students often inadvertently express disbelief that a Black or Hispanic student could be a successful researcher or engineer. McGee also says that there’s a flipside to these racial stereotypes, where many Black and Hispanic attempt to overachieve in order to make up for the bias, but this can result in burnout when it doesn’t get results.

Stereotypes might also account for why there are so few women in computing jobs. Despite Ada Lovelace being the first computer programmer and Grace Hooper investing the compiler (programs that translate code into executable instructions for computers) many consider computer science to be a subject for boys. Television and movies tend to portray computer programmers as introverted men, and many of the commercial products associated with computer science (i.e. videogames) advertise primarily to male audiences. An article from The University of Washington suggests that young women might become more interested in computer science if exposed to learning environments that lack these masculine stereotypes. 

4. Hostility Towards Bringing Up the Problem

In and outside of academia, people will often scoff at the possibility that STEM education could have a bigotry problem. Professors in humanities or arts courses will often open discussions about race, gender, sexuality, and the lack of diversity in “canon” course materials (i.e. sexism in Shakespeare). Such conversations are less common in STEM, where professors often assume the “objective” nature of the course matter would lack anything alienating to students of a particular race or gender. For this reason, STEM scholars often fail to deal with the issues listed above.

These kinds of misunderstandings can be even worse for a layperson. A recent article from USA Today titled “Is Math Racist?” received nearly unanimous derision when first published. The article itself dealt with K-12 teachers using real world examples to ground math problems in something concrete. Some of these math problems, like “calculate your community’s average wage” deal with questions of race. While USA Today may be at fault for publishing an inflammatory title, the vitriol towards the question of racism in math demonstrates how unprepared the general public is to tackle the problem. 

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Photo by Allison Shelley for American Education: Images of Teachers and Students in Action