A lot of the time when researching a specific subject, most people will see professionals as white men, usually in either a work vest or a lab coat doing work. Most of the famous scientists from centuries ago, like Isaac Newton, Galileo, or Nikola Tesla, are pictured as very renown Physicist and are all white men. Today, when you look up famous scientists on the internet, there are 2 women pictured and everyone else is a white man.
fig.1 (NSF)
fig. 2 (Visual Capitalist)
When looking at these two graphs, it is important to distinguish what is happening. In total, 24% of STEM majors (fig. 3) should theoretically follow the same trajectory as America’s Population (fig. 2). Yet when analyzing the differences, there seems to be not so proportionate details in the community. While the percentage of white people’s careers in STEM have lessened 10%, it still dominates the work force. It is more propotional to America’s population with a difference of 4%, but when talking in terms of millions of people, that is a drastic amount. There are two others where the propotion of their population in the US is much different than the proportion of that race in STEM, those are African Americans and Asians. Propotionally, Asians double the amount of workforce compared to the total population percentage. Therefore, making it in large the most drastic difference compared across the two. Yet, 10% is only talking about 10% of 146 million individuals in STEM. Around 39% of the overall population of Asian go into STEM while 25% of white people go into the field (fig. 3). Lastly, African Americans are left to 9% of the total work force. That in tangent with the total population shows that the difference is astronomical. Only about 18% of African Americans go into STEM making the gap increasingly larger for the population to be proportional to its overall average.
Also, it is important to look at sex and see how that is affected. As a ratio, for every 13 men that go into STEM, there are only 7 women that follow. Therefore, it increases the gap even further. While it is getting better as the bars have evened out 3%, the ratio of men to women is 97 men for every 100 women (2020 Census). That means that in theory, there should be more women in stem than men, creating a big divide of what is morally right.
Lastly disabilities in stem is disproportional to the overall level of individuals in the population. They make up around 13.4% of the population (2020 Census) and there is only 3% of that in STEM. Therefore, there is a 10% difference in the overall ratio of disables persons in STEM versus the world.
fig. 3 (NSF)
Where does the interest start from?
A big influence into whether or not students have interests in STEM is from education and how educators bring up topics. They can set up a foundation for the students, especially when you make science content relevant to them. Below are some ideas that one could use to make teaching relevant.
With these ideas, one can see the importance of the content at hand. When making content culturally relevant, it makes students more inclined to get connected with their peers. Making content inquiry based and incorporating more projects can help students get involved with their learning and be more inclined based on events.
Similarly relating content to interests will help students grow upon concepts. For example, when in Physics, you can connect roller coasters, or cars, or a sport that someone plays. Allowing for students to have more inclination to relate to the subject and have an interest in what they want to learn.
Finally, giving students recommendations can help them in the long run. Sometimes, a students home life may be difficult and they may need some guidance on what they want to do. So, recommending what may interest them can be a gateway for the student to get interested and pursue STEM.
Sources:
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/report/the-stem-workforce#representation-in-the-stem-workforce
How can companies or organizations better support diverse talent in STEM?
These are some really neat charts! Have you compared the demographic breakdown and how well the state is scoring on a national average? Is there a trend that with diversity students are scoring worse?
It seems when comparing different states with inclusion, there seems to be little to no correlation between each state. While this is when working in math, but on the national level, it seems that there are states with diversity doing similarly better with states that have little diversity.