Minority American Women Physicists Achieving at the Intersection of Race and Gender

Details Minority American Women Physicists Achieving at the Intersection of Race and Gender Minority American Women Physicists Achieving at the Intersection of Race and Gender

Oct 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005aipc..795r.225h&link_type=abstract

WOMEN IN PHYSICS: 2nd IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics. AIP Conference Proceedings, Volume 795, pp. 225-225 (

Physics

Physics Education

Physics, Physics Education, Gender Issues, Socio-Economic Effects, Human Factors, Professional Aspects, Employment

Scientific paper

As minority women physicists, we stand at the intersection of race and gender. We are physicists to be sure, but we are also women of Native, African, Hispanic, and Asian descent. We are colleagues, mothers, sisters, friends and wives, as are our white counterparts, but our experiences cannot be distilled to only gender or race. As Prudence Carter (2005 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association) and Scott Page (``The Logic of Diversity,'' private communication, 2004) remind us, women of color emerge from the interaction between race and gender. This distinction is important because most researchers who study American women's participation in science focus exclusively on the participation of white American women. Of those who acknowledge the existence of non-white women, most do so by disclaiming the exclusion of women of color because the numbers are so small or the experiences are different from white American women. There are some important differences, however. While American women are 15% of all scientists and engineers, black American women are 60% of all black scientists and engineers. Yet an average of less than 3 black women and less than 3 Hispanic women earn PhDs in the U.S. each year, out of about 1100. As Rachel Ivie and Kim Nies Ray point out in AIP Publication R-430.02, ``Minority women especially represent a great, untapped resource that could be drawn on to increase the size of the scientific workforce in the U.S.'' Donna Nelson's (University of Oklahoma) study of diversity in science and engineering faculties further finds that (with the exception of one black woman in astronomy) there are no female black or Native American full professors. In physics, there are no black women professors and no Native American women professors. Despite such a bleak picture, there is hope. Of the 18 departments that award at least 40% of bachelors degrees to women, 7 are in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Black women are earning degrees from HBCUs at rates above equity, and many singles and firsts at predominantly white institutions continue to persevere despite the obstacles.

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