The Geography of Access in the United States: Examining the Importance of Space and Place in the Pursuit of Gender Equity

• In Event: Gender Equity in STEM Higher Education: Studies of Chile, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to better understand how a systematic barrier, such as the disparity in higher education opportunities by location across the United States, relates to the number of STEM bachelor’s degrees attained among women of color. While researchers have found unique challenges among women of color STEM undergraduates, structural, cultural, and socio-economic factors have been overlooked in most existing U.S. literature. A community-level analysis is critical due to the substantial geographic variation in the availability of colleges and universities across local communities in the United States (Hillman, 2016).

In this paper, we apply the concepts of “intersectionality” (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins & Bilge, 2016) and “geography of educational opportunity” (Hillman, 2016) to examine the relationship between STEM bachelor’s degree attainment, particularly focusing on women of color, and the opportunities of higher education and STEM higher education within local communities across the United States. Anti-racism and feminist scholars posit that policy makers and researchers should apply an intersectionality lens to acknowledge “the complexities of oppression” and the “systemic structure of inequality” that women of color have faced (Harris & Patton, 2019, p. 350; Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 1990; Collins & Bilge, 2016). There is a dearth of studies to address how location- or community-level structures, such as the geography of educational opportunities, affect women of color STEM students’ access, persistence, and degree completion. For example, researchers have not paid close enough attention to whether STEM degree attainment among women of color is evenly or unevenly distributed across the United States. Therefore, we also draw on studies on the geography of education, which suggest substantial geographical variation in the availability of colleges and universities (i.e., two-year vs. four-year, public vs. private) across local communities (Hillman, 2016, 2017; Klasik et al., 2018).

We analyze two large-scale national data sets, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the American Community Survey (ACS), to conduct a location-level analysis. We present an overview of the percentage of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients in the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West regions by race and gender. We also offer the gender and racial population composition of these regions to show the over(under)representation of STEM bachelor’s degree holders by gender and race in different regions.

While the shortage of women of color in STEM fields happens everywhere, we also learn from this study that communities offering more four-year higher education institutions and MSIs have more women of color residents with STEM bachelor’s degrees. When administrators and faculty offer STEM outreach programs to recruit more women of color students, we suggest that they should actively reach out to communities with fewer four-year institutions but more two-year institutions, or communities having a lack of higher education opportunities in general. The professional association for women and URM scientists and engineers also calls for offering more resources to communities with lack of higher education and STEM education opportunities.

Author

• Qiong Zhu, Michigan State University