According to Douglas Medin, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, scientists’ backgrounds influence what they choose to study, who they study and how they approach these questions. For this reason, having a diverse science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce will ensure greater variety in the problems we tackle and the solutions we create.
In a 2014 article published in Scientific American, Medin and his colleagues explained how increasing diversity in primatology resulted in new discoveries.
Early in the history of the field, men studied primate behavior from the angle of males competing with one another for females, thereby relegating female primates to a passive role. However, according to anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, as women entered the discipline, they were more predisposed to pay attention when female primates dominated males or solicited sex from males outside of their group, while male researchers disregarded those observations as outliers.
Women contributed new findings to their discipline by discovering that female primates had a more active role in their reproductive strategies than previously thought.
Likewise, pooling a wide range of perspectives will generate more innovation in the sciences.
As it stands, however, African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans remain underrepresented in STEM fields. They compose only a tenth of the STEM workforce, despite making up more than a quarter of the U.S. population. We are losing out on many voices that could bring new ideas to the table.
“STEM itself is what is going to change the world and contribute to our society with new ideas,” says Kaya Thomas, a computer science major at Dartmouth College and a winner of The Root’s Young Futurist Award. “New groups of people bring innovations, and there’s not as much diversity in the field as it could be.”
In order to diversify the STEM workforce, we need to address the achievement gap between white students and minority students. Compared to students from other backgrounds, African, Hispanic and Native American students start college with weaker high school grades, less background in science and math and more concerns about paying for their education.
By recognizing the fact that underrepresented students are starting in an uneven playing field, colleges must provide them with additional support — such as academic mentorship programs and funded research opportunities — to encourage them to stay in the STEM pipeline.
Increasing the number of minority faculty members also can encourage more underrepresented students to complete their science and engineering majors.
In her 1998 paper, “Persistence in Science of High-Ability Minority Students: Results of a Longitudinal Study,” Dr. Jerilee Grandy found that the presence of minority or female role models and advisors had the greatest effect on the students’ scientific ambition, enjoyment of science and commitment to a scientific career.
Overall, we have a long way to go before the composition of our STEM workforce reflects our diverse society. “If you don’t have a wide range of people from different backgrounds, then you are missing out on lots of potential ideas and viewpoints,” Kaya points out, “If STEM is really about innovation, there needs to be diverse set of people working on it in order to contribute different ideas.”
Yoo Jung Kim is a medical student at Stanford University and co-author of What Every Science Student Should Know (University of Chicago Press), a student guidebook. Andrew H. Zureick, the other co-author of the guidebook, is a medical student at the University of Michigan. Yoo Eun Kim is a Smith College graduate and a Teach for America Corps member in Boston. They wrote this for The Mercury News. .
