Diversity & Technology Blog, Fall 2020

For my final project, I used data from the National Center of Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) to examine the enrollment of minorities in STEM over a decade (2006-2016). There has been a recent push to make STEM more inclusive but I wanted to see how well minorities were being represented before inclusions seemed to become more “mainstream”.

The first data I wanted to look at was minority enrollment in general so I would have a baseline to compare to my next graphs.

Although I wanted to look at the trend for minorities in STEM I included the data for white in order to see the drastic differences between the groups. I was expecting the numbers for white people in STEM to be higher but I never expected it to be about 10 times the numbers for the rest of the groups. When looking at the pink and grey lines, which represent Asian or Pacific Islander and Asian respectively, they seem to be mirroring each other, this is mainly due to the reason that when collecting data they made generalizations but decided to group it together as the same category of Asian. The numbers for Hispanics and Latinos are increasing at a faster rate starting from 2011.

This increase could be explained by some of the methods that Estrada et al speak about in their Journal Article. By having institutions use an action model research plan they can find methods to better understand help those underrepresented groups by providing necessary resources and or programs. All of the points they stressed in their analysis was placing accountability on the institutions because the fault of having low representation cannot just be accredited to the students, something about the curriculum or the way it’s being taught is having a disconnect with underrepresented groups. 

Now having a sort of baseline I wanted to examine how the graph would change if I restricted it to only include full-time students. 

Looking at this graph I can’t help but be drawn to the drastic difference of the labeling at the y-axis. The max value for white students was about 10 million, but full-time white students only reach a max of around 6.6 million. The number of students for Hispanic and Latinos dropped by almost 50% and Black and African American students lost about 400,000 students. I believe that this change can be attributed to the increasing costs of attending college and being able to attend full-time is a privilege because many students may need to become part-time in order to work to pay off loans or for other essentials.

Estrada even stated that “underrepresented minority undergraduate students are more likely than white students to come from low-income households, be first-generation college students, and experience financial strain while attending college or university.” Perna, Laura, and Chunyan Li say that across 4- year universities and 2-year colleges about 81.72% of the students are low-income which they define as making below $30,000 annually.  Since underrepresented minorities are more likely to work while trying to achieve a degree they are at a disadvantage and have less of a chance to engage with the subject they’re studying, and having those barriers seriously impedes the chances of students to continue studying in STEM. 

 

International students have a lot of influence on the U.S. university system, so when I saw how low the numbers were for international students in STEM. In Niall Hegarty’s article, he speaks about how vital international students are to the U.S. economy, and in 2012 they contributed more than $21 billion dollars to the economy. Generally, international students have, “more disposable income to invest in longer educational programs abroad.” so it seems like across the boars there needs to be a change in the way STEM classes are taught. One of the most important things that need to change, if it hasn’t already, is the way we make a sense of belonging in order for minorities to do well and thrive in STEM. Since it was a system that was for the longest time designed for white men, so we need to change the environment so that it’s welcoming to all.

Bibliography

Estrada, Mica, et al. “Improving Underrepresented Minority Student Persistence in STEM.” CBE—Life Sciences Education, vol. 15, no. 3, Sept. 2016, p. es5. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

• Estrada et al look at the underrepresented minorities in the STEM field and try to examine why there isn’t a similar trend for white and Asian students. They further go into potential “pathways” that will encourage underrepresented minorities to keep studying to be in the STEM field. The relevance of this journal article to my data visualization is that there is a general increase in those minorities in the STEM field so they could be implementing these methods and if so they’re proving to be effective. 

Hegarty, Niall. Where We Are Now -The Presence and Importance of International Students to Universities in the United States. Vol. 4, no. 3, 2014, pp. 223–235, files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1054975.pdf.

• International Students are vital for U.S. universities for certain academic programs to exist. The U.S. used to have a “monopoly” on international students but nations are trying to keep their brightest at home. The relevance to my final is that the results of this graph are proving what the journal is saying, the presence of international students is dwindling, especially with the increase in college prices.

Langin, Katie. “A Sense of Belonging Matters. That’s Why Academic Culture Needs to Change.” Science | AAAS, 16 Jan. 2019. Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

• This article speaks about the importance of the environment surrounding STEM education. When underrepresented students have a sense of belonging with peers and educators they perform just as well as their majority counterparts. Its relevance in my final project is that in order to keep underrepresented minorities in STEM they have to feel like they belong, along with having support systems and resources.

Perna, Laura, and Chunyan Li. “College Affordability: Implications for College Opportunity.” NASFAA Journal of Student Financial Aid, vol. 36, no. 1, 2006, pp. 7–24, repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=gse_pubs.

• This journal article gives more statistics on the affordability of college and gives percentages on each financial class and how affordable they believe college is. 

Washington, Harriet A. A Terrible Thing to Waste Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. Little, Brown Spark, 2019.

• Minorities are historically underestimated in every aspect of the word, but especially when it comes to intelligence. This bias has made education fit many white men, so when teaching others it doesn’t always fit, so addressing these biases and reforming them it can make education accessible for all.

“Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2019 | NSF – National Science Foundation.” Accessed 9 Dec. 2020.

• This was the recourse that I used to create my data visualization. It allowed me to gain information on the number of college students in the United States that were majoring in a STEM field. 

 

I knew about the LGBTQ+ center but I was not aware of all the resources that the center provided to the students at NYU. I know there is a strong community at the Washington Square campus but Tandon only seems to have OSTEM, but it would be nice to have a more open community at Tandon. While Chris Woods was presenting I enjoyed his overview of the gender binary because I have been trying to better inform myself on gender and it being a social construct because since I was born they were assigning traits and interests to only two genders but there are a plethora of genders that range from male, female, or gender non-conforming. 

While reading about Ben Barnes I was noticing some similarities in his experience and what Chris Woods was speaking about during the presentation. Ben experienced both sides of a unique view of the potential toxicity in the STEM field, coming mainly from certain men claiming the inferiority of women. He used his voice to help fight for the gender bias that he had experienced in his earlier years in order to improve the lives of his female-identifying colleagues. 

 

 

While David Lasala and Jonathan Bowen were presenting I was impressed by their attention to detail when it came to looking at diversity within their game. They also paid a lot of attention to the diversity among those playing their game, as to avoid implementation bias for those with specific needs for sight, sound, or physical needs.

NYU’s Office of Sustainability overlaps a lot with D&T especially when looking at the areas most impacted by “green” issues are BIPOC. One of the biggest problems with being sustainable is that those options are usually more expensive and when you’re on a tight budget you can’t afford to purchase the sustainable options when the easy, cheap options are worse for the environment. It was nice to see an NYU office dedicated to making the school more sustainable, however, most of the change I’ve seen has been on the main campus, but they have been pushing Tandon to be more sustainable over the last year. 

While using the Konch.ai I was surprised at how well it worked to accurately transcribe the episode of Soul of Reason. However on the occasions that it failed it did so very understandably. In the episode I was assigned to transcribe it was speaking on southern African countries and their leaders, a lot of the things transcribes incorrectly were the names of the leaders. Majority of the mistakes that Konch made in the transcription were when the guest was speaking, I’m not sure if this may be the case but since the host stays constant it may be more familiar with his cadence. Even in the instances where the AI was unable to determine the total number of speakers it was consistent in the lack of errors with the host. I am now curious as to how Konch would handle guest speakers with accents because it had some difficulty writing foreign names I can’t imagine it trying to transcribe someone who isn’t a native English speaker. 

I was very impressed with Rewant Prakash’s presentation, sexual/reproductive education is something that is important because it seems like reproductive health is taken less seriously. India was one of the first developing nations to have a family planning program and it is very beneficial for couples so they can avoid unplanned pregnancies.

My episode of Soul of Reason was about the struggle in Southern Africa, Roscoe spoke with Franklin Williams who had been to Africa on multiple occasions and speaks about how America interacts with Africa and even how African countries enable each other’s abusive behaviors. It was an interesting experience to be able to transcribe this episode of Soul of Reason, while I was trying to make corrections on the transcription I found myself needing to some light research on the Presidents and Prime Minister of Zambia, Botswana, and South Africa because it seems the algorithm had difficulties with the names of African leaders because they might not be spelled how they sound.

A Majority of the locations where Konch had the transcriptions wrong were due to speakers interrupting each other, and even I had a difficult time trying to decipher what they were trying to say. The impact of the technology Konch provides is very important because at times I had difficulty understanding what they were saying, I could never imagine trying to listen to an episode if I were hard of hearing.

In class, David Vintinner and Eduardo Molina presented about NYU’s Institutional Research & Data Integrity. They collect data about the diversity among the students at NYU and they use that data to help market NYU’s diversity to potential applicants, and they use this data to see areas where representation for a group could be higher. 

When looking at the data for male and female enrollment at NYU I was supprised when female enrollment was higher than male. Since going to Tandon leaves me isolated from main campus I forget that these statistics are about NYU as a whole, or at least the New York campus. Being at Tandon it feels like I am one of the maybe 5 female identifying people in the room especially as a computer science major. Tandon has a good ratio in comparrison to other schools because it has a 50% and 46% ratio of men to women. As I was creating this chart I was wondering how they deal with thoes who lie outside the gender binary, when collecting this information do they simply go by sex assigned at birth. Even  if they were to go by sex assigned at birth, there are more then two combinations of X and Y, in certian situations you get people who are intersex and have more than two chromozones determingin their sex such as XXY and XYY. As we beome more informes about thiese subjects I wonder how methods of data collection will change with the times. 

 

For the first hour of class, I was attending the National Black Writer’s conference. I made sure to try and use EventTitan earlier in the day so I knew where to go in order to join the zoom conference at the correct time. I had attended a different virtual conference with a different interface but I was unable to learn the name of it. I thought the interface I had previously used was more straight forward than EventTitan but it did the job it was supposed to do. It was interesting watching you present ideas that we had already learned. I had forgotten about some of the heroes you spoke about so I was re-learning the biases you presented. 

The performance and gamification of certain issues can allow for a different dialogue or even normalize and allow those to see representation that they normally wouldn’t. While looking at Verbatim Performance Lab’s  Kavanaugh Files, it made me remember my feelings the day of the hearing. I vividly remember having a conversation with my U.S. History teacher and she brought up the point of how people would have reacted to the hearings if Kavanaugh was a woman and had that same outburst. A similar thing can be said if Dr. Blasey were a man, because sexual assault is rarely taken seriously but especially so when a man is the victim. 

Using remote methods is something that has become increasingly important over this year. Especially with the rise in recognition that the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten. Groups worldwide have organized to spread their message, but the platform on which they spread information is vital. There is a need to communicate that’s safe and encrypted, using social media is useful but in order to wipe metadata from images and protect the identities of protesters from the police. We have to be more decisive in which methods we choose to communicate, it’s easy to choose zoom because of the popularity but we need to make sure all the means of communication we use serve us and the reason we need to use it.

After class, I viewed the New York Times video of how drastically different the voting process is for BIPOC. The lines to vote in a 2% white area were drastically larger compared to the 80% white area which had no lines you could walk up and vote in minutes. I used a mail-in ballot for this election and I could never imagine waiting for 7+ hours just to vote. There are 5 common ways that can be used to suppress voters:

• Voter ID laws
• Polling place closures
• Proof of citizenship requirements
• Voter roll purges
• Cuts in early voting

These methods of suppression are passed off, by mainly the Republican party (cough cough Trump), as methods to avoid voter fraud because they care about the sanctity of the elections. One of the scariest things I learned in this video was about the case Shelby County v. Holder, which allowed states to pass individual laws about voting requirements without the federal government oversight. States with a history of enforcing racially discriminatory voting laws could put any barriers they wanted in order to make it harder for anyone, more specifically BIPOC to vote. After the Shelby decision, some states like Georgia immediately passed laws that required more from the voter and made an exact match policy which is seemingly inconspicuous but targets minorities and pages them from voter rolls if their information does not match what is on a government database. This caused approximately 55,000 ballots to not be counted and 70% of those ballots were black Georgians.

A sense of nationalism is instilled within Americans beginning with the youth in school, which tells us stating how great America is and how many rights we have compared to other nations essentially having children think from a young age that we’re the best. We were the first to put a man on the moon that’s great, but we make it basically impossible for our own people to vote without having to wait in lines for hours, during a pandemic where those in power didn’t do the basic minimum to keep their citizens safe.

It is wonderful how they are giving out more information on the different ways you could vote for this election such as early voting, voting by mail, and absentee ballots to name a few, but why did they wait until this election to inform us, why now? They could have given these resources during the 2016 election, we could have avoided some of the deaths caused by the pandemic. If we made voting easy and accessible to all citizens Republicans feel like they would never win another presidency, and I agree with them if we solely went by the majority of votes the current president would be Hillary.