Virtue Signaling in STEM Policy: How Diversity and Inclusion Efforts Prop Up White Supremacy

• In Event: Unearthing and Disrupting White Supremacy in STEM Education

Abstract

Women of color are often the focus of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) recruitment and retention initiatives (National Science Foundation, 2015). In the same way that institutions use the images of people of color in their marketing materials, many diversity efforts offer the appearance of equity and inclusion, but actually serve to center whiteness and further marginalize women of color. This study maps how STEM diversity and inclusion discourse is mere ‘virtue signaling.’

Using Ahmed (2012), feminist science studies (Harding, 1991) and feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis (Allan, 2010; Bacchi, 2009; Baxter, 2008), this paper analyzes discourses of diversity and representations of diverse bodies in STEM equity documents from programs and initiatives across the country. I ask questions like, what is diversity? How is diversity understood in STEM policy? What are the goals of increasing diversity in STEM? I examine the assumptions embedded within the framing of the diversity ‘problem’ in STEM.

Significance: Findings demonstrate that the push to ‘include’ more ‘diverse’ bodies in STEM is often about allowing these formerly excluded people the opportunity to participate in the global marketplace. In these documents, gendered and racialized bodies are recruited as tools to enact neoliberal global dominance, and diversity in STEM is therefore one of many discursive tools employed to discipline and assimilate women’s bodies and racialized bodies into compliance with their subjection as human capital. As such, STEM diversity documents actually reify difference and legitimate inequity. This study also shows that STEM is at a pivotal moment in history in which there are possibilities for radical transformative practices that reshape the way STEM is done, taught, and represented, as well as who STEM is for. Although this analysis is not intent on ‘fixing’ the problematic diversity narratives within STEM education policy it does seek to perform critical reparative functions. If we shift our attention from looking at things to see “what they might become rather than as they currently are” (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013, p. 670) then alternative spaces of signification become possible, and we can work toward anti-racist STEM policy. Such examinations can be productive in constructing more holistic, socially just, deep, and potentially transformative diversity practices that work toward a new global order.

Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC:
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Allan, E. J. (2010). Feminist poststructuralism meets policy analysis: An overview. In E. J.
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Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: what’s the problem represented to be? Frenchs Forest,
NSW: Pearson.
Baxter, J. (2008). Feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis - A new theoretical and
methodological approach? In K. Harrington, L. Litosseliti, H. Sauntson, & J. Sunderland
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Author

• Shannon Christine Gleason, Westfield State University