There are a number of false narratives and myths about Black women in STEM. Atlanta’s Spelman College is developing a tool to help set the record straight.
Still in a prototype stage, the Spelman College Virtual Hub will contain a trove of comprehensive data about Black women in science, technology, engineering and math — STEM — that researchers, students, policymakers or any curious internet user can soon access. The new dashboard will also provide resources to find research and funding opportunities, stories about women who have pursued careers in these fields and research articles curated for and written by Black women.
The tool was made in collaboration with the charitable arm of Google, Google.org, which awarded the historically Black college a $5 million grant in 2022 to pursue the project. It is not available to the public yet, though Spelman’s Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM, which is steering the project, is circulating a beta version to faculty, students and other researchers to seek feedback.
“This is an ambitious project, but we feel like it could be transformative and so beneficial to so many people,” said Tasha Inniss, the vice provost for research at Spelman.
The goal is to present both quantitative and qualitative data in a simple, accessible format. Users can select a prewritten question from a drop-down list — such as, “How many Black women are receiving STEM degrees?” — and data in the form of data tables and insights will appear. They can also search key words to find research papers related to any topic using Semantic Scholar, an external search engine for scientific literature.
Spelman plans to add more functions to the dashboard. These include artificial intelligence-powered tools to automate relevant and recent information about the statistics of Black women in the STEM workforce, populating material from the school’s archives or creating and updating lists of conferences and networking events, among other features.
There are also plans to scale the dashboard to include data on Latina and Indigenous women in STEM.
The idea to develop the dashboard came out of a conversation with the leadership advisory board for Spelman’s Center of Excellence more than two years ago.
In trying to promote Black women’s contributions to STEM fields, researchers noted a lack of data, such as the tenure status for Black female professors with doctoral degrees or how many women and men enroll at historically Black colleges and universities. It was all disaggregated.
“I think that the vastness of who we are is not well understood, because the data is not in one central location,” Inniss said.
So the board worked on a proposal and it caught the interest of Google.org. The organization gave Spelman the largest single grant it has awarded for a project focused on women of color in STEM.
A 12-person, pro bono team of engineers, product managers, user experience researchers and designers from Google.org worked full time to help build the dashboard. When this fellowship ended, Spelman hired a user experience designer and a software engineer to continue building and incorporating more features into the platform. Spelman will eventually hire professional services organizations to integrate specialized technical aspects, such as the ability to automatically scrape sources of data.
But dashboard’s main value is to “shift the narrative” and change misconceptions about Black women in STEM, said Celeste Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at Spelman.
This data can provide insight to rebut the notion that the tech world is masculine, male-dominated and exclusionary of women, or that there aren’t any Black women in STEM spaces to begin with. But the tool also promotes the work and contributions of Black women in these fields.
“Not to sound cliche, but I think that the potential is endless,” Lee said.
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