STEM Data Center

The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES), which is part of the U.S. National Science Foundation,  released  a new study on diversity and STEM. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the trends impacting people of color,  women and people with disabilities in STEM education and employment. NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan says: “The Diversity and STEM report provides objective, reliable data on where our nation has made progress towards access and equity in STEM education and careers, as well as where we must do more.” ​

Gender disparities have appeared again and again across different fields of science. And they disproportionately affect women of color. But for any science enthusiast from a marginalized background who wonders whether or not to pursue a STEM career, quantitative sociologist Yasmiyn Irizarry offers some wisdom. “Life is just a little bit easier when we’re doing what we love,” Irizarry tells Inverse.  Irizarry is an African and African Diaspora Studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin and belongs to the Cite Black Women collective created in 2017 by social anthropologist Christen Smith. This organization seeks to bring attention to how often intellectual contributions by Black women go unacknowledged and are effectively erased in citational indices.

According to a new study, children think they have less access to common measurement tools and toys around the house than their parents do. This was the unexpected result Megan Ennes and co-investigator Gail Jones discovered just before launching a year-long program to boost science engagement among minority and low-income families in the southeastern U.S.

A groundbreaking paper published last month in PNAS Nexus, a sibling journal to the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, offers stark quantitative data showing the continued blight of structural racism in academic STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs in the United States. Using a massive dataset of 110,000 students across six large research universities, the study found that white males are still more likely than other groups to earn STEM-related degrees even when they have a poorer academic record. Just as important, the study controlled for the high school preparation of students who intended to study STEM, assuming average grade points of 3.57 and ACT composite scores of 26 (placing students in the 83rdpercentile).

Receiving a grade of C or lower in introductory science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classes — courses like calculus or general chemistry — makes it less likely for underrepresented minority students to earn a degree in these subjects compared to white students with similar educational backgrounds. A team of researchers, led by Penn State scientists, examined records of 109,070 students from six large, public, research-intensive universities between 2005 and 2018, showing that a low grade in even one of these courses disproportionately impacted underrepresented minority students.