HSI Planning Project: Shifting perspectives about why women of color are underrepresented in biology: the role of intersectional identities

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 1 Planning Project aims to better understand the reasons women of color majoring in biology at San Francisco State University (SF State) leave their major. While women are well represented in the field of biology, women of color remain underrepresented.

This underrepresentation both limits the career advancement of women of color in the life sciences, and the unrealized benefit to science by inclusion of their unique perspectives and skills in the biological sciences workforce. This planning project seeks to identify the barriers and facilitators for women of color in biology, using critical information gathered in this project.

A smartphone application will be used to capture information about the day-to-day experiences of women in the biology department at SF State, who are highly diverse. Detailed information about these experiences will be gained by conducting informational interviews with a subset of the women of color who contributed information about their day-to-day experiences via the smartphone app.

This planning project will help to elucidate the complexities encountered by women of color who hold intersectional identities in biology to develop an evidence-based interventions to further supports their valuable advancement in the life sciences.

The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. This project achieves these overarching goals by generating new knowledge about the complexities experienced by undergraduate women of color in biology at SF State, an HSI.

These experiences remain largely unidentified and have not been investigated using asset-based or intersectional lenses. These lenses will be used to analyze data about the microaffirmations and microaggressions experienced by undergraduate women of color in biology at SF State collected through use of the MA2 smartphone application. Responses from 600 participants will be collected to document quantitative and qualitative results.

To validate the qualitative results, 20 informational interviews will be conducted (i.e., respondent validation) to better understand the factors (behaviors, norms, values, social environment) that facilitate persistence in biology for women of color. This new knowledge will be used to design an asset-based intervention that improves persistence of women of color having intersectional identities in the life sciences.

Overall, the funded planning project will provide women of color with the opportunity to share their experiences in biology from their own perspective to authentically inform an intervention focused on faculty development and improved pedagogical practice that is culturally-responsive. Dissemination of the findings will contribute to efforts at institutions across the country to enable the persistence women.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.