College is often touted as a gateway to a better life, but if incoming students aren’t able to persist through college, they can be saddled with debt and no meaningful improvement in their career prospects. Many students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups are less likely to continue beyond their first year of college, . . .
Black Indigenous People of Color
Research from the Pew Research Center in 2021 and 2022 shows that despite longstanding efforts to increase diversity in STEM, Blacks and Hispanics remain vastly underrepresented. How might we do better? A 2022 survey asked Black adults what would attract more young Black people into STEM careers and found that seeing “more examples of high . . .
In a previous Weekly Roundup, we highlighted a meta-analysis of funding by the National Science Foundation over a 10-year period. To review, in 2019, NSF funded 31.3% of proposals from White scientists, but only 22.4% for Asian scientists; the overall funding rate was 27.4%. This translates into a single year award surplus of 798 grants . . .
In a previous Weekly Roundup, we highlighted a meta-analysis of funding by the National Science Foundation over a 10-year period. To review, in 2019, NSF funded 31.3% of proposals from White scientists but only 22.4% for Asian scientists; the overall funding rate was 27.4%. This translates into a single-year award surplus of 798 grants for . . .
The trap of service tasks that take time and energy but are not considered to be significant in promotion decisions was addressed in a recent article in Nature [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03677-6]. The authors describe themselves as the “No Club” because they have both experienced and researched the ineffectual advice to women academics of “just say no” to . . .
Several recent reports warn that despite promising announcements about increasing faculty diversity, the actual increase has been sluggish. As summarized by Inside Higher Ed writer Colleen Flaherty, realizing racial parity between the professoriate and the general U.S. population within the next thirty years requires a rate of change that is 3.5 times the current pace. . . .
Research is showing that data-driven insights are critical to recognizing and rectifying inequities in faculty workloads, particularly service tasks that are expected but don’t count for promotion, such as standing committee membership or mentoring a colleague. Too often, such tasks are expected or requested of women and BIPOC faculty. Rather than “fixing the women/underrepresented” with . . .
November is Native American Heritage Month, and this week’s Roundup is focused on Indigenous researchers in academia, who remain poorly represented, particularly in STEM fields. In the Second Nature article, “Respect and Representation,” four Indigenous scientists speak about the challenges early-career researchers face, and how scientists can respectfully and effectively bring together traditional knowledge and . . .
The transition to remote or hybrid work during the Covid pandemic was more disruptive to women faculty’s academic research than to men’s because of the additional caretaking work they often had to manage, a finding confirmed in several recent studies. Now, research suggests that the pandemic also disproportionately impacted women faculty (particularly Black, Indigenous, and . . .
Research on bias in academia has focused more on tenure and less on promotion to Full Professor. This week’s feature article from the Chronicle of Higher Education is an exception, describing a study of 2000 promotion to full cases across 10 universities. The study found several potential sources of bias that tend to affect women . . .