Women in STEM

A volume in Research on Women and Education Women of Color in STEM: Navigating the Workforce is an opportunity for making public the life stories of women of color who have persevered in STEM workplace settings. The authors used various critical theories to situate and make visible the lives of women of color in such disciplines and workplace contexts like mathematics, science, engineering, NASA, academia, government agencies, and others. They skillfully centered women and their experiences at the intersection of their identity dimensions of race, class, gender, and their respective discipline. While the disciplines and career contexts vary, the oppression, alienation, and social inequities were common realities for all. Despite the challenges, the women were resilient and persevered with tenacity, a strong sense of self as a person of color, and reliance on family, community, mentors, and spirituality. While we celebrated the successes, it is critical that organizational leaders, whether in education or other workplace settings, draw from narratives and counter‐narratives of these women to improve the organizational climate where individuals can thrive, despite their racial, class and gender identity. This book will assist educational communities, professional communities, and families to understand their roles and responsibilities in increasing the number of women of color in STEM.

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. 

"The 11 chapters in this book provide a glimpse into the journeys that women from diverse backgrounds and ethnic differences take in their higher education undergraduate or graduate careers. The diverse women include ethnicities of Arabic, Asian, African-American, American Indian, and Latina"--

A bracingly honest exploration of why there are still so few women in the hard sciences, mathematics, engineering, and computer science In 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, asked why so few women, even today, achieve tenured positions in the hard sciences, Eileen Pollack set out to find the answer. A successful fiction writer, Pollack had grown up in the 1960s and '70s dreaming of a career as a theoretical astrophysicist. Denied the chance to take advanced courses in science and math, she nonetheless made her way to Yale. There, despite finding herself far behind the men in her classes, she went on to graduate summa cum laude, with honors, as one of the university's first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics. And yet, isolated, lacking in confidence, starved for encouragement, she abandoned her ambition to become a physicist. Years later, spurred by the suggestion that innate differences in scientific and mathematical aptitude might account for the dearth of tenured female faculty at Summer's institution, Pollack thought back on her own experiences and wondered what, if anything, had changed in the intervening decades. Based on six years interviewing her former teachers and classmates, as well as dozens of other women who had dropped out before completing their degrees in science or found their careers less rewarding than they had hoped, The Only Woman in the Room is a bracingly honest, no-holds-barred examination of the social, interpersonal, and institutional barriers confronting women-and minorities-in the STEM fields. This frankly personal and informed book reflects on women's experiences in a way that simple data can't, documenting not only the more blatant bias of another era but all the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face. The Only Woman in the Room shows us the struggles women in the sciences have been hesitant to admit, and provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women into fields in which even today they remain seriously underrepresented. Named one of the notable nonfiction books of 2015 by The Washington Post