the problem with "diversity" in STEM

Comments · 702

• CU

  @cutechic86 · 3 years ago · pinned

  OMG this is soooo refreshing, social commentary with a STEM background!!!<br><br> I studied envi sci for my undergrad and I had ethics lectures in multiple courses. But as a Black woman, I found these ethics lectures to be very surface level. In 2015, I &nbsp;learned more about the ethical/social issues of the Flint Water Crisis in my sociology class than in my water envi classes🤦🏾‍♀️.<br><br>So, I thought if I got my Masters in Public Health (envi health conc), &nbsp;I would be able to dig deeper into enviro-socio problems. But, it was the same thing! I learned about the health effects of air pollution, without going into WHY only certain communities are being exposed to these pollutants in the first place.<br><br>The ONLY class I took in my time in grad school that really called out the public health institutional biases and ethical issues was taught by a cultural anthropologist🤣!<br><br>But honestly, what I got from all my schooling is exactly what you were saying! &quot;Diversity in STEM&quot; is going to be problematic until more social justice and equity concepts are taught ALONG with the quantitative concepts.<br><br>Can&apos;t wait to see more of your videos!!

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• SN

  @Snaappy · 3 years ago

  the “performative wokeness” is such a big thing. i only did a BA, nothing postgrad, but academia just bleeds with the “talk big do nothing” while patting itself on the back for buzzwords and phrases they stole from actual POC doing real activism work. this is a great video that tackles the root cause that so many people want to gloss over in favor of “the shiny apple,” you know?

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• WA

  @Warpwaffel · 3 years ago

  Properly teaching people in STEM about ethics is extremely important. Source: Trust me, I&apos;m German.

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• KA

  @KathySierraVideo · 3 years ago

  I’m a software engineer (and a woman) and worked for a time in Silicon Valley. The most depressing/shocking thing was that this profession has no overarching code of ethics. I attended meetings on software dev ethics with representatives from most of the major tech firms, but the proposals were all about “professional work” ethic, as in … being better at how we estimate, price, and deliver software. There was almost never a discussion about the <b>impact</b> software has on the world. And these were people from the companies with arguably the MOST power on earth to shape the future… Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc. <br>Few people seemed to even notice that these meetings were mostly attended by white males, though there was some squirming when someone mentioned the “three black teenagers” image search issue…<br>I spent 30 years working in tech, but the rise of social media eventually made the field intolerable for me.

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• ST

  @steveharrison76 · 3 years ago (edited)

  The fact that someone who thinks that different people are better or worse than others at stuff like maths or science due to “Gender/Ethnic WrongBrain” is considered an expert on anything, is something of a concern.

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• RI

  @richardportch · 3 years ago (edited)

  That stack overflow joke hit hard! The satisfaction of closing 20 tabs cause you finally found a solution is amazing.

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• VI

  @vivtrain · 3 years ago

  At my uni (big, public, pReStIgeOuS) there’s a student led campaign to interweave ethics (not just engr ethics) into technical classes such as data science, ml, security, etc. that’s just recently gaining traction. Many students themselves see how the failures of socially conscious education in STEM has yielded wildly disproportionate outcomes on a societal level. Some of us have been really hurt and disillusioned with STEM because of this problem. We’re here and we’re fighting sometimes against individual department personalities to get this change started. It’s an uphill battle but it’s fighting the good fight.

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• TR

  @trunoholdaway2114 · 3 years ago

  The book &quot;Academically Adrift&quot; was one of the only books that I&apos;ve found that actually criticizes the real problems in higher education and avoids that common circular logic of &quot;we&apos;re successful because we&apos;re better&quot;. <br><br>It really just comes down to money, colleges will bend over backwards to get rich students in the door and rich families encouraged this degradation of educational institutions because they want their children to have an advantage. The lack of diversity has more to do with unequal wealth distribution than anything else (intergenerational wealth). For the rest of us poors the competition for grants and scholarships is fierce and certain upper middle class people have learned how to game that system as well.<br><br>Loving everything about this channel so far, even the silly jokes and music, keep up the good work.

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• CO

  @COLORMIND.mp4 · 3 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYxBi7ssKGM&amp;t=182">3:02</a> &quot;Black and Brown people like space too&quot; WHAT A CONCEPT 💀 makes me think of that one quote that goes something like &quot;Afrofuturism is the simple belief that black people exist in the future.&quot; &nbsp;and some people get BIG MAD over that

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• WE

  @Well_Earned_Siesta · 3 years ago

  Your critique of the chasm in academic programs between “hard” sciences and social sciences is exactly why I did my PhD at Arizona State University. &nbsp;I had a specific research question I wanted to explore in renewable energy, and I was underwhelmed by the existing single-track approaches to advancing our understanding in this space. &nbsp;There are new schools being created at ASU, particularly in Sustainability and the School for Future of Innovation in Society, that not only allow for these interdisciplinary and mixed methods approaches, but actually are exclusively set up for it. &nbsp;Even all of the schools in the Engineering college were “re-orged”away from the pure disciplines and into the societal challenges they are meant to address.

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• AN

  @anuncomfortablenewt4006 · 3 years ago

  Listening to you talk about the physics GRE was SO refreshing. I had a very similar experience with the LSAT. Useless, expensive, long, and completely necessary if you want to get accepted to a law program.

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• DA

  @DarthCool99 · 3 years ago (edited)

  This take about education is so fucking real dude! <br><br>I recently got my education degree, and as I was teaching high school STEM, all my collogues were urging me to keep teaching it. &quot;This is how you get a job&quot; I was told. Repeatedly. Meanwhile, I was having anxiety shits every morning, and I was the most miserable I&apos;ve ever been. I did my best for my students, but I kept being told to stay in the curriculum and that &quot;the curriculum is so packed, you don&apos;t have time to explore ethics.&quot; I have a philosophy degree, not exploring ethics is a massive waste of my ability. <br><br>It&apos;s true, STEM is the hyperfocus of education, because it wants money, and STEM funnels money to /all those scary things/ you listed. I&apos;m not currently teaching, mostly because the whole system I was in felt so gross. I went to work everyday to cram a worldview /that wasn&apos;t even mine/ into a bunch of teens, and, ultimately, that wasn&apos;t even for them, it was for systems that are already failing them. <br><br><br>Obviously I believe in education, but this question of &quot;who is this for&quot; &nbsp;is so poignant, it&apos;s a cutting and simple re-evaluation of the system we&apos;re taught to believe is uplifting. I truly believe deeper changes need to be made to that system, but I&apos;m just not sure how. <br><br>Amazing video btw, the heroic music capped it off majestically.

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