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Increasing the Participation of Black Women in Science and Technology
- Indiana University Press
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INCREASING THE PARTICIPATION OF BLACK WOMEN IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Shirley Malcom I first came to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Office of Opportunities in Science as a research assistant in 1975. The Office had received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an inventory of special programs which had been undertaken to increase the participation of minorities in science, mathematics, engineering and health. The inventory of programs was published in 1976 and listed over 300 efforts nationwide to affect the number of American Indians, Blacks, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans as science, engineering and health professionals. After two and a half years as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, I returned to AAAS in 1979 to head the Office of Opportunities in Science. Staff members of the Project on Women in Science were completing an inventory of such intervention programs for women. This inventory, published in 1980, listed over 300 efforts across the full extent of the educational pipeline to affect the flow of women into science and engineering. And where were minority women? Minority women were prominent neither in efforts for women nor those for minorities, though more prevalent in the latter projects than the former. Staff of the AAAS Project on Women in Science made determinations about including some of the minority-focused projects in the women's inventory based on the extent to which special activities were undertaken to deal with issues specific to minority women, such as recruitment, and making a conscious effort to provide female role models or career materials which prominently featured women. Enrollment figures could not be used alone as indicators of "special effort" since many of the projects, especially those focused on Blacks, had large participation rates by girls or women students. In some cases these programs had a majority of female participants. But rather than reflecting the effort of the project staff, these ratios more often reflected an opting out by minority males who chose sports, work or some other activity in place of a science-focused activity. But in some of these female majority projects of the late 250 / who Gets to Do Science? 1970s, all too often minority women found little that spoke specifically to their particular needs. And what of the needs of minority women in science and engineering? How do these differ from the needs of all women and those of minority males? The special problems faced by minority women in science and engineering were subjects of a late 1975 conference convened by AAAS and chaired by Dr. Jewel Plummer Cobb. The resulting conference proceedings, The Double Bind: The Price ofBeing a Minority Woman in Science, increased the visibility of the issues which minority women uniquely face. Perhaps these reflections for the conference participants can be summed up in an essay written in 1976 which was incorporated into The Double Bind. There seems therefore to be a range of costs to the individual in the attainment of a professional science career. The more an individual resembles the "typical scientist" the lower are his costs. Each factor of deviation from the norm raises the costs so that, as a group, minority women must pay a tremendous price for a career in science. This "differentness" of the minority woman in science may not only be a factor in the scientific community but also in the context of her culture. The tremendous personal cost that results from the combined effect of being a scientist, a woman and a member of a minority racial or ethnic group was frequently alluded to in the conference discussions. The toll of foregone social and personal activity, highly valued in traditionally defined cultural roles, was for many severe. The scarcity of companions of their own racial or ethnic group and gender, progressively greater as the degree of specialization in science increased, was a source of isolation and loneliness. Majority males and, to a lesser degree, females are not required to bear this burden. The feeling of differentness, which for most of the conferees began to develop as early as their interest in science, was reinforced continually by the recurrent experience of being the only woman in so many situations. Perhaps more than anything else it was the isolation (being "the only") that led to the formation of the National Network of Minority Women in Science in 1978. Meeting at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington, some of the Double Bind conference participants and others decided that a...