Reframing Participation in Postsecondary STEM Education With a Representation Metric

Abstract

Efforts aimed at broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) require a holistic presentation of the state of racial and gender participation. Statistics currently used to describe participation often include raw counts of degrees and the percentages of demographic groups receiving STEM degrees. While these data provide insights into demographic trends, they do not present the complete picture because these “traditional” statistics do not capture how well a field of study reflects—or is proportionally similar to—a larger body, such as the college population. If the goal of broadening participation in STEM education is to ensure that all racial and gender groups are proportionally represented, analysts require direct measures of representation. In this article, we present a novel metric that assesses the degree to which groups are overrepresented or underrepresented in a given field. This metric calculates field-specific representation by comparing the proportion of degrees awarded to members of a demographic group in a specific field of study with the proportion of all degrees awarded to that group. Using data from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, we demonstrate the efficacy of this representation metric and show that it provides new insights into STEM participation levels for women and other groups considered to be underrepresented. While traditional measurements show the increasing number of degrees awarded to and the increasing share of underrepresented minority students in STEM, our metric revealed that underrepresented minorities remain underrepresented in STEM fields, especially in engineering and the natural sciences.