STEM Departments Look the Way They do Because that's Who They Feel Comfortable Around

This post really should have been titled

"STEM Departments Look the Way They do Because that's Who They Feel Comfortable Around and it's Just not Worth the Effort to them to Work Towards Real Change"  but that was too long.

We will use Chicago math faculty as a proxy for STEM in the US while readily conceding that we are therefore only getting an approximation due to sampling.  We can get some idea of what this cohort sees when they look at each other in meetings in the grid diagram below

and they are fine with this.

Except for the incredible Hulk guy (probably not She Hulk on account of sexism) this grid rings true to me and most of the darker points are likely to be south Asian in my experience.  Incidentally, you don't have to believe me however. Using the Mathematica code I have already provided or the equivalent Python code using PIL or some other similar package, you can create your own such grid diagrams about your favorite local STEM department.

My assertion is that the grid diagrams have looked like this or even more homogeneous and lighter for the past 70 years since Brown v. Board. If it seems unfair to start the clock at 1954, fine then, the past 40 years since 1984.

Even before DEI and all of the non stop diversity talk, faculty could be heard saying more or less, 

"Well we would really love to hire minorities/underrepresented candidates, but we just can't seem to find any qualified candidates."

Really?  I would ask two questions:

• How hard did you look?

and much, much, more important

• How hard did you work to create such future candidates?

I can certainly accept that there are departments that made a real effort but failed to find candidates that were a "good fit". That's the rather loaded phrase they like to use.

But I know for a FACT that most departments have done very little to create that pool of future candidates because it is just not that important to them when it comes down to it.

It's worse than this actually: high schools tend to have more diverse faculty, but in STEM, not that much more diverse generally. Moreover, the kids attending all of the various special enrichment programs and academic contests in math and cs for example also look pretty similar to the above grid.

My advice to black, Latinx, and Native American students and parents is to ignore the rhetoric. It's easy for people to say they care about an issue whilst they do nothing: look at where and on whom the institutions and individuals are spending their time, energy, and money when making academic decisions that could have very long range consequences.