Black and Hispanic workers remain underrepresented while it varies widely by field for women
A new report highlights the racial, ethnic and gender gaps in representation among STEM students and professionals.
Efforts to promote equity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and math have a long way to go, a new report suggests.
Over the last year, widespread protests in response to the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other unarmed Black people have sparked calls for racial justice in STEM. Social media movements such as #BlackinSTEM have drawn attention to discrimination faced by Black students and professionals, and the Strike for Black Lives challenged the scientific community to build a more just, antiracist research environment (SN: 12/16/20).
An analysis released in early April of federal education and employment data from recent years highlights how wide the racial, ethnic and gender gaps in STEM representation are. “This has been an ongoing conversation in the science community” for decades, says Cary Funk, the director of science and society research at the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Because the most recent data come from 2019, Pew’s snapshot of STEM cannot reveal how recent calls for diversity, equity and inclusion may have moved the needle. But here are four big takeaways from existing STEM representation data:
Black and Hispanic workers remain underrepresented in STEM jobs.
From 2017 to 2019, Black professionals made up only 9 percent of STEM workers in the United States — lower than their 11 percent share of the overall U.S. workforce. The representation gap was even larger for Hispanic professionals, who made up only 8 percent of people working in STEM, while they made up 17 percent of the total U.S. workforce. White and Asian professionals, meanwhile, remain overrepresented in STEM.
Some STEM occupations, such as engineers and architects, skew particularly white. But even fields that include more professionals from marginalized backgrounds do not necessarily boast more supportive environments, notes Jessica Esquivel, a particle physicist at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., not involved in the research.
For instance, Black professionals are represented in health care jobs at the same level as they are in the overall workforce, according to the Pew report. But many white people with medical training continue to believe racist medical myths, such as the idea that Black people have thicker skin or feel less pain than white people, reports a 2016 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.