Recent political and legal challenges to affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at universities have disrupted efforts to diversify the STEM pipeline. Yet these obstacles should not deter institutions from continuing to pursue equity. Instead, they underscore the need for more innovative, targeted strategies to engage underrepresented, marginalised and minoritised communities in STEM.
One such strategy involves reimagining the narrative and marketing of STEM to better resonate with women and people of colour. I do this through children’s books, romance novels, science communication, hip hop slam poetry and social media engagement.
Diverse voices and perspectives are central to innovation and excellence. The consequences of exclusion are evident: soap dispensers that fail to recognise darker skin tones, biased AI systems that default to portraying academics as white men, and chatbots that reproduce racial and gender-based prejudices.
These are not isolated design flaws but symptoms of a broader systemic issue: the absence of diverse perspectives in critical spaces. Increasing the presence of Black women in STEM is a matter not only of equity but also of societal and technological progress.
Drawing from personal experience as a Black woman in STEM, I reflect on factors that influence the success of others who share similar lived experiences to mine. Some of these are influenced by the impactful work of the Black in Engineering 2020 call to action.
Role models: the first Black woman engineer with a PhD I recall learning about was Mae Jemison. She became the first African American woman in space in 1992, four years into my undergraduate studies. Seeing her on the national stage was deeply inspiring, yet I often wondered how different my experience might have been if I had encountered more role models like her earlier in my academic journey. Representation matters because being able to see someone who looked like me achieving such heights in STEM would have affirmed that I, too, belonged in these spaces. It would have been just the encouragement I needed to spur me on.
Mentorship: my first mentor was a colleague at Ford Motor Company who later became my professor in graduate school. He was the first Black engineer with a PhD with whom I had a personal connection. His guidance sustained me when my professional career and academic journey began to feel like an obstacle course. Every step along the way towards my academic engineering career felt foreign to me, so having mentors of all backgrounds was integral to my success. Inspired by and recognising the importance of those relationships, I too became a mentor and role model.
Community building: one of the most persistent challenges for Black women in STEM is isolation and marginalisation. Community-building efforts, including affinity groups such as the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers and the American Society for Engineering Education, provide essential resources for networking, professional development and collaboration. Universities must support faculty participation in these communities by providing financial assistance for conference attendance and professional engagement on national stages.
Education: it is crucial to educate academic communities about the biases, microaggressions, stereotypes and systemic barriers Black women in STEM encounter. In my experience as a Black woman in the academy, these biases often show up on my course evaluations, annual reviews, teaching assignments and committee work. Creating an inclusive environment requires shared responsibility and continuous education.
- Collection: Being Black in the academy
- What we can learn from Black women academics in the UK
- The transformative power of mentoring in historically black colleges and universities
Reduction of invisible labour: Black women in academia disproportionately bear the burden of service work, often teaching introductory courses and serving on numerous committees. This “invisible labour”, coupled with cultural taxation, limits their ability to focus on research, publish their work and mentor students – critical elements for promotion, tenure and retention. Administrators must therefore be intentional about supporting Black women to move up through the ranks. They can do this by setting limits on service expectations and valuing diversity and inclusion work through reduced teaching loads and formal recognition in tenure and promotion dossiers.
Professional development: often, university leadership does not reflect the diversity of its student or faculty population. This represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Institutions should create clear pathways for Black women to assume leadership roles, including as department chairs, deans, provosts and presidents. Targeted mentorship and leadership development programmes are essential to fostering this growth.
Institutional change: in my academic journey, I have served on no fewer than three diversity committees, task forces and initiatives. Since I am so passionate about diversifying STEM, agreeing to serve on so many diversity committees began to feel like a double bind. Black women in STEM faculties feel a similar conflict when asked to do the inclusion work that takes away from the work they need to do for promotion and tenure.
Supporting Black women in STEM requires recognition of these conflicts and making sure diversity work does not put an undue burden on them. Institutions can increase representation through cluster hiring, recruiting from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions and active participation in conferences focused on marginalised communities, such as the Grace Hopper Celebration.
Third-party evaluations of institutional culture, hiring, retention, compensation and climate can also help drive systemic change. As part of this process, institutions must be transparent about their data including gender and racial demographics, salaries, promotion, tenure and retention.
Resources: as a first-generation PhD holder, I was completely unfamiliar with many aspects of academia, including salary negotiations, startup packages and other resources that would have made my first years in the academy much less chaotic. Institutions must be proactive in this regard by offering adequate startup funding, lab space, research staff, graduate student support, and assistance with grant writing to Black women STEM academics. Early-career faculty may not always be familiar with institutional negotiation practices, so structured, transparent support is critical to their success in academia.
Recognition: Black women faculty – particularly those early in their careers – must be recognised for their academic and research achievements, not solely for diversity-related contributions. Acknowledging and celebrating their work as technical professionals helps affirm their legitimacy and combats tokenism. Institutions can support this by nominating them for prestigious awards, showcasing their work on institutional platforms and promoting them through websites, newsletters, articles and social media.
My experience was not merely a passage through a “leaky pipeline” but an ongoing navigation of an ever-changing obstacle course. Challenges emerged at every level, often daily, requiring adaptive and responsive strategies. There is no one-size-fits-all solution – but there must be a commitment to flexible, intentional and sustained efforts that recognise and uplift a community vital to the future of STEM.
Carlotta A. Berry is an academic at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
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