during my second year in college I took
a spring break trip to a beautiful
country where I was recommended against
drinking the water and this was my first
international travel without adult
supervision and so I really wanted to
embrace the identity of world traveler
and I didn’t want to be that pretentious
American who used bottled water to brush
my teeth so I drink the water inevitably
it became pretty ill and I went to my
university health center and I told them
I had just been in this beautiful
country I drank the water now I’m sick
and they said well what’s most likely
happening is you have a stomach flu you
have a bug just go on a liquid diet
you’ll be fine and I said no no you
don’t understand I was just in this
country I drink the water I’m feeling
really ill they said no going to liquid
diet
so I did and after losing about 15
pounds I realized that that chicken soup
wasn’t really soothing my stomach or my
soul and so I went back to that health
center and I asked them to do some more
tests and I’ll not share the details of
those tests with you right now but once
I did those tests they gave me the
diagnosis that I knew was there although
I didn’t know the word for it at the
time when I heard that word what it did
for me was gave me a confirmation that
what I was feeling that wasn’t addressed
with the word stomach flu or stomach bug
something else was there so that word
was Giardia I won’t go into details of
what that is um but with that word it
let me feel like there was a word for
this there was a diagnosis and I could
move forward to a solution and so I’m
sharing this talk with you because even
though I’m there not the medical kind of
doctor Ellis I did have the opportunity
this past summer to give a kind of
diagnosis or put words to an experience
that like Giardia is not a good
experience but an experience that many
people across this country have felt so
along with a team of researchers this
past summer we identified that women are
50% more likely to switch out of the
stem pathway
after taking calculus one when
controlling for intended major reports
of instruction previous calculus
experience SAT or a CT scores
school and professor so that means that
50% more of the women who are taking
calc one planning to take calc 2 because
they want to be an engineer they want to
be a chemist or whatever are leaving
that after the experience of calc 1
compared to the men um no this isn’t a
groundbreaking finding much like it
wasn’t so groundbreaking that I
contracted Giardia after drinking water
in a country for which I hadn’t
developed the proper immunity is in my
stomach but like Giardia just by giving
the words to this experience I got to
help diagnose something that many people
were feeling now when I give this talk
or when I talk about these research
findings across the country inevitably
there will be some in the audience that
says well what about race and ethnicity
have you done similar analyses trying to
understand the experience of race and
ethnicity with or without gender so
maybe looking at the intersectional
perspective – and I say well that is a
wonderful question
unfortunately there is such a low
percentage of non-white students in our
sample that we can’t run the same
statistical analyses to give the same
strong quantifiable results and then the
person in the audience like some of you
I’m seeing right now nod your head and
understand MIT um the person feels good
because they ask the right question I
feel good because I gave the right
answer and then we move on so this has
happened for years I’ve been presenting
on this data for years and been giving
these answers for years and it’s been
fine and it struck me that it was
similar to when I went to the health
center and said I’m having these
symptoms and they said most likely you
just have a stomach flu here’s a remedy
and that remedy had no bearing it didn’t
help me at all because it wasn’t what I
was experiencing that by not actually
looking at the experiences of these
students of color in our calculus
classes even though they’re a smaller
percentage that were making their
experiences invisible much like the
doctors made my journey invisible by not
testing for it and so what we’re doing
is not understanding the actual
experiences of these students in the
same way that we can in order to provide
a solution so we have two problems here
we have the problem of diversity and
stem that we’re all well aware of it’s
being published all over and talked
about in the news but we also have the
problem among researchers that when we
write these findings when we talk about
them when we answer these questions
we’re not really looking deeper into
what’s happening with our answers so
although my answer has been accepted as
correct it is correct it’s expect or
accepted by the research community it
doesn’t tell the full story and so I was
recommended to not just come up here and
tell you some problems but also try to
understand some solutions now certainly
the problem of diversity and stem and
representation of women and students of
color and persistence is not so easy to
solve as the pill that they gave me to
solve merger Ardea but we can think
about ways to go about it by just trying
to actually understand what’s happening
so here we are we’re at Colorado School
of Mines many of you are students and
and so I understand that you probably
get the situation that’s going on here
but I’m just going to share some numbers
really quick so Colorado School of Mines
is almost entirely a stem school there’s
some economics majors but we’ll just
group them into stem for now in 2014
there were about 900 students graduated
with stem degrees of those 900 students
around 25 percent were earned by women
on less than 10 percent were earned by
Hispanic and Latino students and less
than 1% were earned by black or
african-american students so I imagined
that the classes here at Colorado School
of Mines the calculus classes which are
feeding into these stem majors look
fairly similar if not even more
homogeneous than this sample that I
looked at in my study and so what can
you do as students as faculty as parents
whatever your relationship is to this
University as students I want you to be
asking more questions I recommend that
you think about why do your classes look
the way that they do or if you read
research try to understand why is there
too few students to be able to do a
similar analysis what’s put in the
footnote of multiple of my studies right
now
and if you’re in the position
be giving answers to people which is a
wonderful place to be in I want you to
question those answers that you’re
really comfortable giving because
although they might be right that night
might not be the full story so we need
to do better at looking into what’s
actually going on so for me this talk is
a public coming out and acknowledging
that when I gave that answer so many
times that I was missing the whole story
and I’m asking of you today to be
curious like we just heard in the past
talk and ask more of those questions and
question the answers that you’re speaking thank you