Why STEM is harder for minority women

Helen Chen, a rising pre-vet senior majoring in Environmental Biology at Columbia University, had plans for a career in science from a young age.

“I didn’t really grow up with this conception that women couldn’t do science,” she says, “My parents are from Communist China, and say what you will about Chairman Mao . . . but part of this whole communist revolution was that in many ways everyone was expected to be proletariat and everyone was expected to contribute somehow. So at least listening to my mom tell it, there’s not this expectation of women not being capable of science.”

Helen’s maternal grandparents have Masters in Physics; her grandmother has been a professor her entire life. Women in her extended family have completed important work in STEM.

Before Helen attended, both her parents received science PhDs from Columbia – something she laughs off, saying,  “I’m going to check that privilege right now!” Her dad studied Operations Research and her mom studied chemistry, “birthing a dissertation and a human at the same time.”

Helen grew up thinking she wanted a science PhD without knowing exactly what that meant. At Columbia, she has come to appreciate new meanings of a career in STEM. Moreover, her keen interest in social dynamics informs her of the diverse obstacles experienced by science-minded women of various races, classes, and abilities.

Helen describes the age-old dilemma of stereotype threat and women in hard sciences as “endlessly intersectional.” The most pertinent gender issues she faces as a student and an employee in the sciences have mostly to do with mental health.

Beyond Columbia’s campus, Helen struggles with stereotypes as a person who fights depression. After a hard semester of seeing others around her face serious battles with the illness, she still had difficulty asking for healing space and work adjustments amidst the throes of her own depression.

“The intersection I’ve noticed the most is between my self-care and my status as a woman,” she reports. “When I’m imagining my [professional] mentor, I’m constantly afraid that he’s going to be judging me or think that I’m incompetent because I have an emotionally based illness as a woman. Even though I know logically that’s not how he would feel . . . and he happens to be white, and a dude.”

Our conversation noted that this double standard for women and emotion extends to professional life in general: society rewards emotional men for “vulnerability and humanity” where it deems women incompetent – but especially in science, where objective, unemotional work projects can impose inhuman expectations for detachment, a trope of the scientist Helen refers to as the “cold, rational human being.”

This double standard has fierce implications in a male dominated, demanding field notorious for demeaning and even objectifying women. Chen adamantly spoke of the import of considering the largely difficult position of women of color in STEM, and especially that of those who identify as black and Latinx.

“This is from my immediate view and of course I don’t have statistics on this, but when I look around me the friends of mine that are really (more) struggling with mental health issues tend to be my friends who are women of color, and I tend to see it a lot in the sciences.”

At Columbia, a space more sensitive to mental health and diversity issues than the greater STEM workforce, Helen sees discrimination more often in issues of representation than overt aggression. She describes most people in her major as “Asian or white passing,” noting the specific difficulties of friends of other identities.

Pointing out that she has seen stark representation rifts and a lack of support for women of color and particularly black and Latinx women in science, Helen says, “Even in terms of Columbia’s faculty, there are definitely considerably more male professors in STEM fields, and this is particularly true the “harder” the Science, meaning the more physical sciences–chemistry, physics, math, etc. Particularly true in the Engineering school. I remember my friend telling me (she is Puerto Rican and a Computer Science Major in the Engineering School), she has had exactly one professor who was not White, or East Asian, or South Asian the entire time she’s been at Columbia . . . and he was still a man.”

Despite that veterinary school acceptances and Biology BA recipients show a huge female constituency and a better-than-average gender ratio compared to other sciences, there’s still a barefaced problem of gender and power dynamics in the realm of high-ranking positions and achievements. Helen notes seeing less male-female representational disparity degree programs than in ratios showing higher ranking positions of authority in professional life. “[Veterinary Medicine is] gendered as a female science nowadays, but there’s still this evidence of limitations,” she says.

Broader studies on women in STEM haven’t reached Helen’s advanced intersectional perspective, but they generally corroborate her theory that women who aim for prestigious positions in the sciences often experience fateful discrimination. Power-hungry male scientists take advantage of their female subordinates on the regular. Recent sexual misconduct lawsuits and dismissals at Caltech, Chicago, Berkeley, and University of Washington show that male superiors frequently lack respect for women in the sciences so much so that inordinate harassment and even abusive behaviors occur far more frequently than they should, and far more frequently than they do in other fields.

Sexism definitely has its statistical side: despite more comparable male-to-female ratios for BS degrees, according to a statistics by Unesco summarized in the New York Times there’s one PhD granted women for every two granted men. When women passionate about science begin their trajectory, they do not anticipate the bullshit that crops up along the way.

By hearing from students like Helen Chen, we should realize that though sexual misconduct presents some of the most severe and ostensible power abuses in STEM and academia at large, there’s still a monstrous project to undertake in addressing more persistent and pervasive inequalities in the field. Many of these inequalities could be dealt with by implementing programs that more fairly hire for higher-ranking positions and provide feedback-based support systems for underrepresented identities. These support resources should offer students STEM-specific support from people with identities more similar to their own.

When asked whether she’d pursue a PhD along with her Veterinary degree, Chen responded, laughingly, “No way, fuck that.”

Science is hard for women and particularly hard for women of minority identities in the field. The never-ending scandals and inequalities we hear about in news and STEM initiatives might be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the work that need be done in order to make respected positions in the field more accessible to people of all walks of life.