Diversity, Immigration, and STEM Policy: Exploring the Implications for Women of Color and the Future of STEM

• In Event: 25.042 - (Re)Considering STEM Education for Social Justice and Sustainability

Abstract

Question and scholarly significance: STEM has gone from an obscure acronym to a well-known signifier of American educational crisis and failure. Because STEM is represented to be so vital to U.S. global dominance, there is an intense push to bring more individuals into the fold of STEM. Women and girls of color are often the subjects of these attempts toward inclusion because they are not participating in STEM in proportion to their population (National Science Foundation, 2015). At the same time, policies such as the STEM Jobs Act of 2012 (H.R. 6429) and the H-1B visa program, which allows for temporary immigration, encourage and expedite the employment of “high-skilled” immigrants, i.e., STEM graduates, to address the STEM ‘crisis’ (Wasem, 2012). This creates some dilemmas in regard to diversity in STEM. While STEM visas provide employment pathways for immigrants, especially immigrants of color, such policies disproportionately favor men. Women immigrants of color with STEM degrees and U.S.-born women of color with STEM degrees are yet again left behind as they are disproportionately unemployed in fields that have a high number of guest workers under the aforementioned immigration policies (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014). Additionally, there is evidence of anti-immigrant sentiment in STEM equity policy documents, in which immigrants who are not native English speakers are represented as problems to U.S. STEM dominance (e.g., National Academy of Sciences, 2011). Thus, these multiple and competing policies and discourses place women of color, especially immigrants, in a difficult space.

Framework and method: This paper uses policy discourse analysis (Allan, 2008) to explore these issues affecting women of color through an examination of STEM diversity policy documents that seek to address disparities in education and employment. I analyze documents from 2000-2015 that are specifically geared toward the status of women and girls of color. Importantly, they were created in the context of increased privatization, marketization, competition, and anti-immigrant sentiment, while at the same time in an environment of increased calls for “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” in STEM fields. For this presentation, I focus on passages dealing with immigration.

Results and Conclusions: I show how only certain kinds of immigrant bodies are valued: those that can ‘do’ STEM, and those that can start STEM businesses in the U.S., rather than in their home countries. Immigrant women of color are represented as merely inputs into the machine of STEM. Through the language of supply and demand, immigrant women of color are discursively constructed as resources in the marketplace, tradable commodities, and diversity is couched in market discourses rather than regarded as an issue of, for example, personal enrichment, social justice, or democratic citizenship. Inclusion in STEM is therefore defined in economic terms, and the purpose of STEM education itself is defined as service to national economic interests. The idea of diversity as a commodity shapes not only understandings of diversity in STEM, but also the discursive spaces in which women of color must move. This has particularly concerning effects for women immigrants of color who are triply burdened by STEM immigration policies.

Author

• Shannon Christine Gleason, University of Connecticut - Storrs