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Nearly forty years ago, a small group of highly accomplished women of color working in STEM fields gathered together to share their stories about how the "double bind" of race and gender had set them "apart at every turn," required difficult personal choices, and rendered the price of a career in science-particularly in higher education-far too high. Their resulting collective sense of mission produced the first recorded blueprint for change specifically designed to alter the forces that had kept them small in number, relatively invisible, and excluded from mainstream science (Malcom et al. 1976). Yet, after decades of work and sacrifice to open the doors for women of color in STEM fields, differential participation persists, disparities in level of achievement continue, and a career in science still exacts a heavy personal and professional toll. And so we ask, what new approach can we bring to bear on this issue in order to make the most compelling case for change as we face the challenges of the twenty-first century?
STEM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
There are many good and fair reasons to invest in increasing the number of women of color in STEM and not least among these is the social justice argument that the opportunity to pursue personal and professional success is a fundamental right for all of our citizens. But, faced with new labor market projections that indicate students of color will account for 45 percent of the nations public high school graduates by 2020 (Prescott and Bransberger 2012), we cannot continue to merely implore institutions of higher education to "do the right thing." Moreover, the majority of students in this pool of students are female. Among African Americans, for example, approximately 64 percent of all college enrollees are female. Nor can we continue to allow a slow pace of change that focuses solely on the necessary, but insufficient, effort to add one, two, or three more women of color to a physics lab or computer engineering department.
We argue that this is not a matter of eschewing the social justice case; it is simply a matter of unpacking that case within our current economic context. Our nation is facing a STEM pipeline crisis in a world where both our workforce needs and the growth...