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Various developments in science have helped developed countries contend with the COVID-19 pandemic more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Despite the US government’s pandemic response being slower in some respects to that of other nations, it did manage to produce vaccines and treatments that have helped save many people, including many vulnerable populations, from succumbing to the virus. Prior to the COVID pandemic, many people might have been skeptical that the developed nations of the world could mass produce a viable vaccine in the 9 months subsequent to the genetic analysis of the virus. Medical technology has come a long way in the last 20 years, and this progress owes much to the collective efforts of a diverse body of scientists.

Diversity efforts in STEM can greatly enhance innovation insofar as they help bring various perspectives together to generate ideas and solutions. Yet, even though the benefits of such diversity are clear, its promotion and actualization is a long and difficult process. Schools have been desegregated for 60 years now, but in STEM fields, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) continue to be underrepresented, despite tremendous efforts to increase diversity.
Within the College of Engineering and Applied Science at CU Boulder, we have seen some progress from the standpoint of student and faculty demographics. Our student body is more diverse in 2020 than it ever was. From 2010 to 2020, the relative population of BIPOC students has almost doubled on average for all ethnic and racial groups. Currently, more than 30% of our students are BIPOC. 

From the perspective of gender distribution, engineering programs are traditionally known to enroll fewer female students. Ten years ago, for example, only one fifth of our students were female. Now, females represent one third of the students in CEAS. In the future, the College’s hope is to attract more women and eventually achieve a 50:50 gender ratio. This and other improvements in diversifying our student population have been exciting news. 
When we look at faculty representation, on the other hand, we see varying degrees of progress regarding representation. On the one hand, the proportion of tenure and tenure track female faculty (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Full Professor) has increased from 19% in 2010 to 25% in 2020. Additionally, one third of all Assistant Professors are female.

By contrast, BIPOC faculty representation has stagnated in the last 10 years, hovering at around 24%. Additionally, the proportion of young BIPOC TTT faculty is even lower than it was in 2010. 

The hiring of new faculty is the only way to increase BIPOC faculty representation. Getting a TTT faculty position is a challenging & competitive endeavor. Typically in every year, there are only 10 TTT faculty positions available in the College, and there are thousands of applicants. This is a common situation in every research-intensive university in the country. Due to what has been termed a structural bias in the academic system (Barber et al., Science 2020), BIPOC people are often found at a disadvantage and unable to compete with non-BIPOC applicants for the same TTT faculty job. As a result, fewer BIPOC faculty tend to be hired. Granted, other factors influence faculty hiring, and so it is difficult to know for sure why numbers of BIPOC faculty have dropped from 13% in 2010 to 5% in 2020, but they have. The yearly average over the last ten years of newly hired BIPOC faculty has been 17%. This data indicates that improvements in the faculty hiring process may be necessary to increase the cultural diversity in the new faculty pool. 

While the concept of meritocratic achievement lies at the heart of Academia, a true meritocracy is only fair if everyone has equal access to similar opportunities. To help increase the representation of women & BIPOC faculty in a field in which they are traditionally underepresented, such as engineering, several institutions abroad have adopted the more controversial practice of positive discrimination recruitment policy.

Dr. Robyn Sandekian, who leads the Diversity Faculty Recruitment initiative in our College, spoke to the Colorado Engineer on the University’s approach to increase faculty diversity. “In the past 3-5 years, the College has implemented at least 5 evidence-based strategies to expand the diversity of the faculty applicant pool”, Dr. Sandekian said; “These strategies include improving descriptions of job advertisements and broadening personal networks to reach underrepresented minorities faculty candidates”. Sandekian also added, “These efforts have led to small improvements in the diversity faculty recruitment, but we have not been able to match the population of our undergraduate student body”. Recently, Sandekian reported how some of these approaches changed the CEAS faculty hiring outcome in the American Society for Engineering Education conference paper entitled “Interventions in Faculty Recruiting, Screening, and Hiring Processes Enable Greater Engineering Faculty Diversity”.

“Beyond the current best practices that we have been implementing for years, we need a systemic, cultural change in the College that will value the diversity itself”, Sandekian said. If we do not intervene with the status quo, “It will take us 20 years to reach female faculty ideal representation and up to 70 years for underrepresented minorities”, Sandekian added. 

Since its inception in 1893, our College has evolved many times to provide the best academic environment for its students and faculty. In the century to come, we need to maintain this momentum by continuing to strive for a world-class education and research environment for people of all backgrounds. 

True diversity is not just about hiring people with different backgrounds. It is what happens when people are free to bring their perspectives to bear, to speak their mind, and to bring the best of themselves into the room. If we are willing to experiment  with bold methods, it is my hope that we will one day achieve that kind of diversity.

You can use just the image in this folder and/or take screenshots of the diagrams from the pdf, up to you. I think they can help the article but aren’t fully necessary. I don’t have better quality versions of these than the screenshots, but let me know if they are still very messy and I can ask Jack to send me them.
 

Engineering Center photo by Elliot Whitehead