The Role, the Purpose and the Radiation Test Dummy

              Since its founding in the 1700s, the United States’ ride toward racial, ethnic and gender equality has been as bumpy as the rest of its history. While most people can accept that giving everyone an equal chance to reach their potential is the best thing to do on a moral and social level, there is also concrete evidence showing that broader diversity can make companies more profitable and countries more competitive.

              In 2019, a group of economists from the National Bureau of Economic Research published a study examining access to education and employment by Black and white men and women from 1960 to 2010.[1] The research team of Hsieh, Hurst, Jones and Klenow found that between 20 and 40 percent of the increase in the country’s gross domestic product achieved during that time could be attributed the more efficient “allocation of talent.” The named the increased entry of women and Black men into highly skilled professions, such as medicine, as the cause of this. A similar work published in Harvard Business Review found that venture capital firms with more diverse teams had higher profits and success rates.[2] In other words, when women and people of color are not held back by artificial social barriers, they earn more degrees, invent more technology and generate more wealth, and these effects ripple outward into the rest of society.[3] According to the National Science Foundation’s 2019 report on women, minorities and people with disabilities in STEM, however, the U.S. still has a long way to go before it can reap these benefits.[4]

              One of the reasons to focus on broadening diversity in STEM is its potential to snowball. The Harvard Business Review team found that venture capitalists were most likely to form partnerships with other people who resembled them racially, but they were also nearly as likely to partner with someone who held a degree from the same school they’d gone to. In other words, the more people of color and women who enter these fields and find their way to the top, the more normal this will seem, and the more young people will follow them into STEM.

              While the NBER study did not address individuals with disabilities or people of color other than Black men and women, it is likely that their results can be extrapolated to these groups. Since the 1960s, second-wave feminism, racial and ethnic equality movements and progressive social policies such as Affirmative Action have made strides toward bringing the country into balance. Per NSF findings, things are getting better in many ways, but there is still a considerable way to go.  For example, while Hispanics and Latinos make up 14 percent of the U.S. population, they hold only 8.5 percent[DF1]  of the science and engineering jobs. Whites hold nearly 70 percent of the full-time science and engineering positions. If, like the NBER team, we assume an equal distribution of talent throughout the country, significant barriers to entry and success remain in place.

              For women, the story is more complicated. Although women earn about half the science and engineering degrees, they receive only 41 percent of the doctorates. Although women of color tend to earn more degrees than men of color, the disparity among white women and men means that men still outnumber women overall in many fields. Though women have come to outnumber men when it comes to receiving degrees in psychology, social science and biology, these tend to involve lower earnings.[5] The reasons for this can be complicated. For one, women were found to be roughly ten percentage points more likely than men to cite family responsibilities as the reason they did not work full time. For another, while much of the gender pay gap has been blamed on the fact that some women interrupt their careers when their children are young, several specific fields have seen a drop in pay once they begin to be perceived as female, most notably biology and human resources. Other fields saw pay increase when men began to enter—computer programming.

              Salary is another sticking point. Women and people of color tend to earn less than their white male counterparts for the same work. For example, even though women earn about 75% of the psychology degrees, men in psychology earn an average of $8000 more. Among people of color, only Asians out-earn whites, with a median salary of $100,000 per annum, followed by whites at $90,000 and other groups at $78,000.

              Across both color and gender gaps, the distances between peaks increase with altitude. The higher the degree or level of achievement, the greater the discrepancy between women’s and people of color’s proportionate and actual numbers.

              In the past few years, there have been a few highly visible cases in which the inclusion of women, people of color and people with disabilities—and failure to include them—has become apparent: Facial recognition systems have an estimated 34 percent greater error rate on Black faces than on white ones.[6] It is difficult to imagine that this mistake would have been made if there had been a greater number of diverse development teams. In the other direction, ergonomically female crash test dummies were introduced only this year.[7] So far, there are no laws in place requiring the auto industry to use them, however.

              One notable vehicle development project does use diverse test devices: Project Artemis’ Orion spacecraft launched with one male and two female mannequins equipped to measure acceleration and radiation.[8][9]

              As of 2019, 31 percent of NASA’s Engineering and Technology Directorate was made up of minorities, 27 women and 5 percent people of color.[10]

*This post deliberately written to a style guide other than AMA.

[1] Hsieh C, Hurst E, Jones C, Klenow P. The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth. Econometrica. September 2019; 87(5): 1439-1474. http://klenow.com/HHJK.pdf

[2] Gompers P, Kovvali S. The Other Diversity Dividend. Harvard Business Review. 2018. https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-other-diversity-dividend

[3] Gibbs K, Marsteller P. Broadening Participation in the Life Sciences: Current Landscape and Future Directions. CBE Life Sci Educ. 2016 Fall; 15(3): ed1. doi: 10.1187/cbe.16-06-0198

[4] National Science Foundation. Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. 2019. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19304/

[5] Green Carmichael S. Women Dominate College Majors that Lead to Lower-Paying Work. Harvard Business Review. April 19, 2017. https://hbr.org/2017/04/women-dominate-college-majors-that-lead-to-lower-paying-work

[6] Najibi, A. Racial Discrimination in Facial Recognition Technology. October 24, 2020. Harvard Univeristy Graduate School of Arts and Science: Blog, Science Policy, Special Edition: Science policy and social justice. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discrimination-in-face-recognition-technology/

[7] Osborne, M. The First Female Crash Test Dummy Has Arrived. November 4, 2022. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-female-crash-dummy-has-arrived-180981072/

[8] Press Release. Hambleton K, Warner C. Public Names ‘Moonikin’ Flying Around Moon on NASA’s Artemis I Mission. January 29, 2021. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/public-names-moonikin-flying-around-moon-on-nasa-s-artemis-i-mission

[9] Strickland A. Meet Commander Moonikin Campos, the mannequin going farther than any astronaut. November 15, 2022. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/world/moonikin-campos-artemis-1-saturday-launch-scn

[10] Our Diverse Workforce. NASA. https://etd.gsfc.nasa.gov/workforce.php Retrieved November 18, 2022.