This post is part of my coverage of the Science Online 2010 conference.

Dr. Anne Jefferson of Highly Allochthonous blog headed up this session to “Identify successful online and offline programs, and their commonalities, for recruiting diverse participants into STEM activities” and to “Draft a set of recommendations for individuals, employers, and STEM organizations for supporting women and minority scientists and science students through social media;” with the term “diversity” referring to a diversity of gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, employment sector, geography, age, philosophy, or socio-economic status.

Jefferson presented a great deal of survey data she and her peers had conducted soliciting opinions on the effectiveness of blogs supporting women in science, which found that students and academics felt reading these blogs made their personal experiences feel more normal, inspired an interest in academia over industry, and provided a feeling of connection within the field and with other women scientists; however, the same study found women in government and industry held a neutral or even negative perspective of such blogs for reasons at which we may only speculate.

Lyndell Bade on NSF’s GK-12 Program
Credit: Moi

Lyndell Bade presented in lieu of DNLee of Urban Science Adventures blog on their efforts with NSF’s GK-12 Program (couldn’t find a link to specific program). This inspiring program focused on ecology and evolution, with summer research opportunities and high school internships, she described how girls in the program went from being afraid of even touching birds to naming and caring for them. She also mentioned how the group of students went from being segregated to integrated over the course of the project and came up with the name “Future Ecologists As Researchers (F.E.A.R.)” for their group.

Evelyn Lynge presented on the American Association of University Women (AAUW), an organization I of which I was unaware, but has a long illustrious history following its foundation in 1881 by 17 women with college degrees, which includes raising money for Marie Curie to buy radium, lobbying for women’s suffrage in 1920, support of the 1964 Civil Rights act, and, most recently, efforts in passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.

Suzanne Franks presented on fostering a community, with some deep insights into the process such as knowing your history, using creativity to overcome monetary constraints (like starting a support group with chips, soda, and a volleyball net), and building connections outside of the community through space and time (WEPAN, mentornet, Chronicle Forums, and the ADVANCE Portal). She also presented a list of her favorite books on the subject, highly recommending Diann Jordan’s “Sisters in Science: Conversations with Black Women Scientists on Race, Gender, and Their Passion for Science,” while Vicky and I also added Jane Margolis’ “Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing” as highly pertinent to our own efforts.

A Disconnect to Consider

Memes of note from the discussion included the hypothesis that the Christian Clerical origins of many sciences contributes to the exclusion of women, a woman working in industry noting that the majority of her coworkers were women (mine too) and wondered if the issue of a lack of diversity wasn’t worse in academia, and taking advantage of the fact that online communities may be fashioned without ethnicities, genders, or other differentiating traits. This last idea led to another commenter raising the question of whether it was more important for online communities to be diversity-neutral and stand on the merit of ideas alone, or if it was better for people to know the gender, race, etc of participants so there may be role-models with which others may identify.

Is a lack of identity in an online community “a bug or a feature?” was the question one participant raised. One problem with online anonymity, it was countered, was that it allowed people to associate whatever stereotype the reader had with the speaker. An example given was a blogger who regularly wrote about her medical doctor, who was identified as a woman, but whom commenters on the blog continually referred to as “he”. Another point was raised that, when a gender/ethnicity identity is revealed, critics may use it to reinforce their stereotypes, as when it is discovered that someone is a women, a male with gender-bias might think, “That’s why her ideas are wrong.” This reminded me of this classic Non-Sequitur Comic Strip illustrating this same idea.

At the same time, it must also be taken into consideration that the minorities within a field or at an organization may not appreciate being foisted into a role-model status, and that university departments should be sensitive to whether they are trying too hard to stress the presence of minorities within their organization.

Random Personal Thoughts:

Vicky has covered our efforts to bring our neighborhood kids into computer literacy with the incentive of giving them laptops (See her posts for classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12), and a delicate objective within that is to introduce them to our geek culture while encouraging the students to express their own unique perspectives to online mediums. It’s challenging for me to consider that I don’t ever consciously think about the fact that I am culturally identified as Caucasian, but our neighborhood kids do continually make reference to the fact that they are African American, and I can cite many instances of them self-stereotyping, as when one student criticized another for using a “white-people voice” when talking to us. Ethnicity does play a large role in self-identification for minorities, and role-models who buck the stereotypes are crucial in challenging everyone’s assumptions.

“Know Your History”

I work in the Information Services Division of the Coast Guard’s Aviation Logistics Center, where I have noticed that more than 50 percent of the programmers over the age of 40 are women. Under 40, the percentage of women programmers drops dramatically. This is because, historically, computing was women’s work. The ENIAC Programmers were women and one of computer science’s programming pioneers, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, was a woman. Somewhere along the way things changed, women began to perceive computing as a “geek” thing, unattractive as a profession (despite the fact that there is nothing more attractive than a geeky lady).

While the geek factor probably plays a part in the lack of African American representation in computing, in our local the poverty factor also presents a barrier to students going into computer science. An African American child in Elizabeth City North Carolina wanting to go into computer science, despite a personal interest in computing and social support in the form of scholarships and student loans, would still be facing an imposing cultural barrier: they have grown up in households without computers. This lack of resources comes up again and again during different conference sessions, and is a major obstruction to breaking down the barriers to academia for people of lower socio-economic status.

Additional:

See the wiki for this session, which has links to additional resources.

You can see a PDF of my raw notes from this session here.