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Schreckinger, B. (2018). Trump acknowledges climate change—At his golf course, Politico, May 23, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-climate-change-golf-course-223436.
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Funk, C., and Rainie, L. (2015). Public and scientists’ views on science and society, Pew Research Center, January 29.
19.
Crease, R. (2019). The workshop and the world: What ten thinkers can teach us about science and authority, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
20.
Mahler, J. (2016). The problem with “self-investigation” in a post-truth era, The New York Times Magazine, December 27.
21.
Otto, S. L. (2016). The war on science: Who’s waging it, why it matters, what we can do about it, first ed., Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Chapter 2
The Professional Scientist
Is the disheveled, gray-haired, Einstein-like character in a lab coat still a good representation of a scientist? Who are our scientists, and who should they be?
In an interview with the Guardian, Donna Strickland, 2018 physics laureate and the third woman to ever receive a Nobel Prize in physics, says, “I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.”[1]
As discussed in this chapter, the situation for women and people of color in science may have improved over the last decade, but inequities still exist. Many people still see the woman before they see the scientist. The United States and the world as a whole have not been taking full advantage of the diverse pool of potential scientists. We may have found and nurtured many future Einsteins, but we have fallen behind in cultivating new Marie Curies and George Washington Carvers. To stay competitive in the current economic system, to solve our global food needs, and to overcome our environmental problems, countries, companies, and academic institutions need to make use of all scientific talents available across a vast array of gender identities, races, and ethnicities.
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
