Research will only become more diverse if more people listen to the research on diversity
It is six years since the Campaign for Science and Engineering published a thoughtful report, Delivering Diversity, on the actions needed to broaden diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
But despite public acknowledgement of the problem by science minister David Willetts and others, there’s little sign of any real progress. The proportion of young women undertaking physics-related degrees, for example, has barely budged since 2008.
For this to change, campaigners for diversity in STEM subjects must employ a different strategy. For a start, they need to make more of the body of research that identifies the factors that constrict diversity.
CaSE and other campaigners, such as the union Prospect and the Wise campaign for diversity in STEM subjects, have failed to offer a rigorous critique of the system. Yet this is a prerequisite for a fuller understanding of what blocks many women and members of other underrepresented groups from fulfilling their potential in scientific careers.
The campaigners have plenty of data on undergraduate degree choices, but they’ve steered clear of any intellectual engagement with wider critiques of power structures in society and how they influence the attainment of senior positions in science. And there has been no attempt to build decent models of the system so as to mount an effective intellectual challenge to its flaws and biases.
Kate Sang, a management scientist at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has carried out this sort of work in the field of architecture. Her research was published in the journal Work, Employment and Society in January. Sang showed empirically how white, heterosexual, middle-class men continued to dominate architecture thanks to gender-biased working practices, such as long working hours, and the desire of senior men to socialise and work with other men.
Barbara Bagilhole, a sociologist at Loughborough University, and Abigail Powell of the University of New South Wales in Australia, have conducted similar investigations into the role of gender in scientific careers. Their research challenges the structures of an entire profession.
Without more attention to such work, there can be no effective challenge to how research institutions operate and, intentionally or not, hinder progress towards greater diversity in STEM subjects. Campaigners need academic experts in order to grapple with the invisible privileges of people with power—department heads and PhD supervisors. Some of those with power, such as University of Cambridge sociologist of education Diane Reay, recognise their own conflicted role in existing structures. “I feel as complicit and compromised as many other academics are feeling,” she wrote on the website Discover Society last month, in an opinion piece arguing against the influence of neoliberalism in universities.
Observations from the likes of Reay should be employed more fully by campaigners, who are in the privileged position of being able to pull together academics’ diverse analyses. As they continue to push for reform to the system, they should not dodge this opportunity.