Abstract
Women are increasingly essential to the science and engineering workforce of the United States, as are members of historically underrepresented minority groups. Native-born U.S. white men now earn a smaller absolute number of science and engineering doctorates annually than they did a generation ago. Half of all undergraduates studying science and engineering in the United States today are women, as are over a third of those who receive science and engineering doctorates. Yet the stereotypic scientist or engineer today is still a white male. Many who do not match this stereotype find a “chilly climate” when they attempt to study or to work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields. Female students have higher attrition rates from STEM majors than their male counterparts, and more women than men are lost from STEM fields at every educational and career transition. Such losses are costly, both to the vigor of our STEM workforce, and to the individuals whose ambitions are not achieved.
A considerable body of research has explored the factors that lead girls and women to leave science. Yet little attention has been paid to ethnic subgroups of women, whose experiences may well differ from those of women in the white majority. In Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education, Sandra Hanson points out that African Americans have historically viewed strength, employment, and heading families as fitting for women. In the black community, therefore, femininity may well be more compatible with science careers than it is in the majority white culture. To understand the experiences of African American girls and women in science one cannot simply add together insights from research conducted with white women and that conducted with African American men or presume that African American girls experience a “double jeopardy” based on their gender and race.
Hanson explores the actual experiences of African American girls and young women in science by drawing on two very different data bases and combining quantitative and qualitative analyses. Much of her quantitative data comes from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) of American youth, a nationally representative study begun in the late 1980s. Students were followed from age 13 through the high school, college, and postcollege years. To be included in Hanson’s study sample (581 young African American women and a comparison sample of 3,365 young white women) the young women had to have remained in high school through the twelfth grade. Hanson also conducted a Web survey in 2003 of 13- to 30-year-old African American girls and women (N=281) and a comparison group of similarly aged white women (N=781) in which she elicited open-ended responses to vignettes about young people in science as well as more standard questionnaire responses. Through both of these studies Hanson examines the science aspirations and achievements of young people, as well as the ways in which teachers, peers, parents, and others are experienced as influencing such aspirations and achievements.
The picture which emerges is a complicated one, suggesting that young African American girls and women often are drawn to study science and to pursue science careers, sometimes more strongly than white girls and women, yet frequently experience skepticism of their work in science. Yet Hanson finds that in some ways being black and female is less discouraging to scientific pursuits than being either white and female, or black and male.
Hanson’s focus on African American girls and young women in science is needed and welcome, and her use of qualitative methods is valuable. Her work raises many questions for future research to address. The broad agerange Hanson has studied, from 13 to 30, encompasses very different stages of life, and it will be important in future research to examine the particular experiences of girls and women separately. The NELS longitudinal study was begun in the late 1980s. Are the experiences of contemporary eighth graders different from those eighth graders of a generation ago? Hanson only examined the responses of NELS participants who remained in high school through the twelfth grade. What might we learn by examining the views of respondents who dropped out of school earlier? Did they report different patterns of attraction to and discouragement from science study?
The taste of qualitative analysis Hanson provides whets the appetite for richer and more fully developed material. The Web survey format does not allow for follow-up questions that could provide important clarification, and I sometimes wondered how respondents understood key phrases. What does a “science occupation” mean to respondents of different ages, genders, ethnicities, and social class backgrounds? Could differences in the interpretation of such key phrases account for some of the results Hanson presents? We certainly need insight into the science experiences of girls and women from specific ethnic groups. Hanson helps us to understand one important group of potential scientists as they “swim against the tide.”