Title: Increasing the Number of Underrepresented Minorities in Astronomy: Executive Summary
ArXiv ID: 0903.4505
Date: 2009-03-27
Authors: Researchers from original ArXiv paper
📝 Abstract
Promoting racial and ethnic diversity is critically important to the future success and growth of the field of astronomy. The raw ability, drive and interest required to excel in the field is distributed without regard to race, gender, or socioeconomic background. By not actively promoting diversity in our field we risk losing talented people to other professions (or losing them entirely), which means that there will be astronomical discoveries that simply won't get made. There is demonstrated evidence that STEM fields benefit from diverse perspectives on problems that require more complex thought processes. This is especially relevant to a field like astronomy where more and more work is being done collaboratively. The lack of notable growth in African American, Hispanic, and Native American representation in astronomy indicates that the 'pipeline' for these individuals is systemically leaky at critical junctures. Substantially more effort must be directed toward improving the educational and career development of minorities to insure that these potential colleagues are supported through the process. However, simply recognizing that the pipeline is faulty is woefully inadequate. There must be very specific, targeted solutions to help improve the situation. With this in mind, we offer two position papers addressing specific areas of improvement that we identify as (a) essential for any foreseeable progress in the field, and (b) attainable in the 2010-2020 decade. These position papers focus primarily on African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Although we do not directly address issues of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and other groups, many of the recommendations made here can be adapted to address issues faced by these groups as well.
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Deep Dive into Increasing the Number of Underrepresented Minorities in Astronomy: Executive Summary.
Promoting racial and ethnic diversity is critically important to the future success and growth of the field of astronomy. The raw ability, drive and interest required to excel in the field is distributed without regard to race, gender, or socioeconomic background. By not actively promoting diversity in our field we risk losing talented people to other professions (or losing them entirely), which means that there will be astronomical discoveries that simply won’t get made. There is demonstrated evidence that STEM fields benefit from diverse perspectives on problems that require more complex thought processes. This is especially relevant to a field like astronomy where more and more work is being done collaboratively. The lack of notable growth in African American, Hispanic, and Native American representation in astronomy indicates that the ‘pipeline’ for these individuals is systemically leaky at critical junctures. Substantially more effort must be directed toward improving the educati
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Promoting racial and ethnic diversity is critically important to the future success and growth of the field of astronomy. The raw ability, drive and interest required to excel in the field is distributed without regard to race, gender, or socioeconomic background. By not actively promoting diversity in our field we risk losing talented people to other professions (or losing them entirely), which means that there will be astronomical discoveries that simply won't get made. There is demonstrated evidence that STEM fields benefit from diverse perspectives on problems that require more complex thought processes.1 This is especially relevant to a field like astronomy where more and more work is being done collaboratively.
The lack of notable growth in African American, Hispanic, and Native American representation in astronomy indicates that the “pipeline” for these individuals is systemically leaky at critical junctures. Substantially more effort must be directed toward improving the educational and career development of minorities to insure that these potential colleagues are supported through the process. However, simply recognizing that the pipeline is faulty is woefully inadequate. There must be very specific, targeted solutions to help improve the situation. With this in mind, we offer two position papers addressing specific areas of improvement that we identify as (a) essential for any foreseeable progress in the field, and (b) attainable in the 2010-2020 decade. These position papers focus primarily on African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans. Although we do not directly address issues of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and other groups, many of the recommendations made here can be adapted to address issues faced by these groups as well. We summarize the discussion of these papers as follows:
• Undergraduate, Graduate, and Postdoctoral Levels (Paper I) A clear means to improvement is in tending to the educational transitions in which potential minority PhDs are lost. This includes the transition for minority physics and astronomy undergraduates into astronomy and astrophysics PhD programs, or similar careers beneficial to the astronomy enterprise 3 . Partnerships with minority-serving institutions (MSIs) can provide an effective and immediately attainable solution, as they not only provide critical stepping stones to the PhD, but also because the strength of these undergraduates in physics, engineering, and computer science offer promising avenues for engagement in instrumentation development, support, and large scale computing/data-mining. Early and continuous research engagement is critical to this vision, in which the federally funded undergraduate research internship programs (e.g., NSF REU), and national centers and observatories (e.g., NOAO) play a vital role.
To keep our technological workforce strong in the next decade and beyond, we must proactively increase opportunities for minority students in STEM areas well before they reach the undergraduate level. The astronomical community can and should play a critical role in supporting these opportunities because of Astronomy’s wide spread appeal and inspirational nature. Our community must improve its efforts to develop and sustain education opportunities for today’s minority elementary, middle, and high schools students, in order to attract, recruit, and retain them in astronomy and related disciplines, and insure that there continues to be a well qualified pool of undergraduate and graduate students from which to recruit. Only by actively engaging these communities can the U.S hope to continue its leadership in astronomical discovery and knowledge.
These position papers were prepared with the intent that several study groups for the State of the Profession will take interest in them, with specific attention to the study groups on Demographics (DEM) and Education and Public Outreach (EPO). These submitted papers do not include their appendices, which can be found on the AAS CSMA’s website at: http://csma.aas.org/events.html
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The vast under-representation of minorities in astronomy remains a staggering challenge despite at least two decades[KGS1] of awareness of the issue. Let us briefly examine the challenge quantitatively.
Over the past 20 years, the absolute number of PhDs awarded annually to underrepresented minorities in the field has grown slightly, from approximately 3±1 in 1988 to approximately 5±1 per year in recent years. The corresponding proportion of minority PhDs has been roughly flat at 2-4% of the total (see Paper I). During this same time period, the proportion of underrepresented minorities in the U.S. population grew by 33%, from 20.9% in 1988 to 27.0% in 2009 (data from US Census). Consequently the relative underrepresentation of these groups in astronomy and astrophysics has been steadily worsening.
What must be done to achieve parity in the production of underrepresented minorities in the field? As of 2004,
