American Scientist

Workplace power structures often reward conformity more than talent, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) jobs are no exception. Even when underrepresented researchers establish careers in the sciences, they are often expected to adhere to the cultural norms of a system dominated by white males. Shirley M. Malcom is working to make STEM education and careers more welcoming to people from all backgrounds. Malcom is the director of Education and Human Resources Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She trained as an ecologist but for the past four decades has focused her efforts on building opportunities for budding scientists. Malcom says that the first hurdle to overcoming the biases in STEM workplaces is deceivingly difficult: recognizing that there is a problem. To that end, she helped establish and is the director of SEA (STEMM Equity Achievement—the additional M is for medicine) Change, an AAAS initiative. SEA Change utilizes one of scientists’ strengths—data—to uncover biases that institutions might not recognize are present in their organizations. Malcom spoke with special issue editor Corey S. Powell about the heartbreaking structural problems she has seen in STEM workplaces, and why it is important for an institution to be inclusive. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lack of diversity in the workplace has been a problem for a long time. What are the biggest successes you’ve seen, and what are the most stubborn obstacles that still frustrate you?

I do think we have made good progress with regard to women in some areas of the sciences. We’re at parity or above in the life sciences and in the social and behavioral sciences, except for economics. Women are now the majority of those in medical school.

After I’ve said the good stuff, we still have issues around questions of leadership. Advancing into higher-level positions is still a challenge for women. Take, for example, medicine. Even though women have been running at least 40 percent [parity] for about 20 years, you don’t see that in division chairs, department chairs, or as deans. That’s a real problem. We can get in, but we can’t necessarily get up.

The challenges around race are so much more stubborn. I keep telling people race is really different. We’ve made some halting progress. We slide back. But right now we’re on a downward slope in a lot of areas. Especially for Black women.

Thinking that we’ve made more progress than we have can lead us to complacency. A lot of the progress has occurred because of intervention programs, things that you can put in place to bring people in, help prepare them, and support them. Those programs tend to be soft money–funded and highly reliant on volunteers. And in some cases, with the increased judicial and legislative scrutiny of the programs, people are gun-shy of even running them.

The nature of the racism we’re talking about is not about the way an individual treats another individual. It’s systemic racism. The systemic nature of the problems that we face has not been accompanied by the systemic nature of the solutions. People want to stick a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. It’s not gonna happen. The first thing is, you have to stitch up that gaping wound. Offering that kind of aid is often seen as favoring somebody, as opposed to addressing the wound that you might have given them.

What are some ways that institutions can be more inclusive?

Historically Black colleges and universities [HBCUs] involve a fairly small proportion of all Black students, and yet they make an outsized contribution to the STEM students [see Empowering Success]. Many of these schools are under-resourced, and they don’t necessarily have all the amenities that the predominantly white, huge research institutions have. But they’re somehow still overcontributing to the number of STEM students.

It’s something about the environment that they create, and the ways they encourage the students. The culture of belonging, the community, the support, the expectations, and so on. But you can do that anywhere. You don’t have to be in an HBCU to do that. There are places that are not HBCUs that have adjusted their cultures. They’ve taken those lessons, and they have adjusted those cultures.

How can you make people more aware of these issues, and get them mobilized to create a fairer system?

There are things that we just don’t see anymore. Fish don’t see the water. We don’t see certain things that are barriers. And that means that you have to start with a self-assessment that asks you about everything, the things you see and the things you may not see. If universities are going to survive, their future better be more diverse than their past has ever been. The question then is, how do you make a welcoming, diverse future possible?

I have been living in this skin as a Black woman my entire life. I have faced all of the kinds of barriers. There’s always something there to remind you that you don’t belong. There’s no one around who looks like you. I expected that life within the scientific community would be different because of a stronger reverence and reliance on evidence. But I began to understand that at the end of the day, we’re just all people.

We’re in the best time in the world to look at this issue because everything is disrupted. There are things that we know from the research, about forms of instruction that are in fact more successful for all students, but especially effective for students of color and women. In the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a reckoning on race, we have been given the opportunity to redesign, recreate, and reimagine how we educate.

How do you overcome the common attitude that fairness is a zero-sum game—that fairness toward you comes at a price in fairness toward me?

Often when people talk about unfair policies, they cite facts that are not true. Their perceptions do not necessarily match the facts. Which is one of the reasons I like SEA Change as a model, because you know what it depends on? Your own data.

I’ve had people argue with me about national data. One man told me that it can’t be the case that women’s pay and equity are lower than men’s because the last woman hired in his department was offered a higher starting salary than someone else. I said, “And that’s an N of one.” This man is a scientist, but everything that he otherwise would have known to do just had fallen away.

Look at your own data. Look at the data over time. Do you feel you’ve been making progress? What do the data tell you about whether you have been making progress? I am hoping, at least with the scientific and technically trained community, that evidence will matter. I’m doubtful that all of the institutions that think they’ve made progress have in fact done so, but look at your own data.

What arguments do you find are most effective in convincing institutions of the value of investing in diversity?

We have to begin to understand the positive reputational value that is going to be associated with being a safe and inclusive place. A lot of people want to pit diversity initiatives against merit, but, quite frankly, the research is telling us that creativity and innovation emerge from diversity.

Bringing together these different experiences, these different moments that people have had in their lives, creates a lot more working capital—different perspectives that we can use to tackle the really big problems that we face. Energy, climate, sustainability, the next pandemic. These aren’t trivial. And we’d better get everybody off the bench and on the field.

I try to understand how systemic racism has affected our populations, but also how it has interfered with real understanding. I was struck by how long the National Institutes of Health spent trying to find out what Black scientists were or were not doing that caused them to not get supported, rather than saying, “What didn’t the agency do? What message is the agency sending?” It’s this vicious cycle of blaming the victims rather than the institutions. Or, as I say sometimes, the system is the problem.

People ask, “Where do I start?” And I hate to say this, but everywhere. But if you start anywhere, you will end up everywhere, which is the nature of systems. I was trained as an ecologist, so I’m very comfortable with the messiness of interconnected systems. A lot of people want linear pathways. The minute the stuff starts to deviate, folks get uncomfortable, because they can’t control all the aspects. Somebody once told me that if you can control it all, you’re not doing the work.

A lot has been written recently about the need to build “trust in science.” Do you find those discussions helpful?

Trust in science? When I hear that, I want to say, whose science? People tend to trust people that they know, and the low levels of representation of people of color within the sciences may make it harder to do the kinds of cultural translation that people appreciate.

I code switch between my worlds. How do I help people understand that it is to their benefit to trust this vaccine? They don’t know anything about spike proteins. They are not going to care about the structural biology that went into understanding it; however, many of them are a lot more conversant than I would have imagined about mRNA. But to a certain extent, they take hope from the fact that somebody who looks like them is working on this stuff. Over time, diversifying our community is going to be a critical component of building trust in science.

We have a lot to get over, because there have been betrayals in the past [see Treat Human Subjects with More Humanity and Who Dares to Speak Up?]. Part of the reparations needs to be a pledge that this will not happen again. A pledge that we have structures in place—such as institutional review boards, laws, and policies related to human subjects—to prevent a repeat of those betrayals.

Lauren Resnick [professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh] once said to me, “We tend to value what we can measure and measure what we value.” We place one value over another one. For example, whether somebody can take and pass the basic science courses should not be what medical school is about. It ought to be about whether or not someone would be a capable, competent, compassionate health care professional. You can help someone overcome a bad biochem grade, but you can’t give somebody a shot of empathy. They either have it or they don’t. But the system is structured in a way so as to advantage one group and disadvantage another. I’m disadvantaged because I have not had what I need in order to show up well using the metrics that you chose to prioritize.

There’s a familiar narrative that science is purely evidence-based, and that scientists just look at things as they are. But when you look deeper, there are layers of cultural decision-making and cultural assumptions that go into science. How can we bring people to a broader, more honest perspective?

I thought it very interesting that astronomers started including the Hawaiian goddesses in their naming protocols. They branched out of Greeks and Romans. Give us more options here in terms of what we call this stuff. We’re making progress. But you have to be so careful, so mindful. I know the people of Hawai’i have their own grievances about the Thirty Meter Telescope [a proposed observatory on Mauna Kea, a traditional sacred location].

Another example is, we’re finally realizing that the greatest genomic diversity is sitting in Africa, not among the six or seven white guys who might want to contribute to genome projects [see Genetic Blind Spots]. And some Africans have grievances about researchers wanting to control the ability to get their genomic information. But there’s no way to do personalized medicine if you don’t have an adequate and diverse genomic base. It may be personalized for you, but it won’t be personalized for me.

A podcast interview with Shirley Malcom: