STEM race calculation has just entered the most critical stage

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That’s right-the resource phase is crucial. If allocated correctly, resources (especially financial resources) will provide the infrastructure needed to solve long-standing problems. In other words, the resource should not be the end of the conversation, but the beginning. Without them, almost nothing would happen.

The question is, once we have them, how will we deal with them?

one year later George Floyd was murdered, the scope of the third phase is expanding: new positions are created, newly hired employees have been greened, and the anti-racism and diversity promises of the job announcements are impressive. . However, these important advances in the past (I want to emphasize that all of them are important) now we have entered uncharted territory.

The defining question of the new phase 4 is: are we there yet? What should we do and how do we know if we have made progress? If we hire many local computer scientists in the next five years, are we doing well? Few people would doubt that this is a good sign. If the enrollment of students with disabilities with self-identification ability doubles in the next two postgraduate groups, we should be encouraged.

Even here, we must be careful and consider the following lessons Goodhart Law: When an indicator becomes a target, it is no longer a useful indicator.

If the number of black or brown scientists is small, it indicates that the institutional culture is biased or unpopular, then please target these numbers Alone Not the way to change this culture. Further expansion, if you only change the number of black and brown faces in the crowd, there may not be much change.

But this is not entirely correct.Ensuring that increasing the diversity of faces in the crowd is a section the goal. Because the problem is so large, shock therapy that immediately increases the number of treatments may produce critical mass. Critical numbers will at least make early career scientists from marginalized communities alienate their plans and careers. Furthermore, culture will also change.

Perhaps the fourth stage should be a rigorous assessment of our progress. Every complex plan aimed at solving social illness requires an equivalent (or higher) tool to measure whether the plan is fully effective. The road to nowhere, even with the best intentions, is paved (from stage 1 to stage 3).

If we have not yet determined the true purpose of the goal, then even our ability to evaluate is of no avail. Even more prosaic: have we checked the problem we are trying to solve in any of these stages? The problem is, I mean more specific than “solving systemic racism.”

This stage and all subsequent stages will succeed only when we clarify everything with a disturbing fact: Institutional racism is so harmful because it lurks on the margins of society, usually on a path that is difficult to diagnose and legislate. They are difficult to diagnose doesn’t mean they are meaningless. The opposite may be correct: marginal racism is difficult to diagnose, precisely how racism embeds itself in the entire universe and decays society from within.

This decay manifests itself in how certain start-up pitches are received relative to others.

The key is who becomes an expert and why we need certificates from some people but not others.

It lives on the editorial board and the dissertation and promotion committee.

It tells us why students with talents or similar interests are guided differently, and why some people should be encouraged to engage in more challenging and potential projects.

It explains why one scientist is labeled as multidisciplinary, while another scientist is labeled as similar work.

It exists in the way that professional networks are usually established in social and informal settings. (I may not like IPA, but I can benefit from related after-get off work chats.)

It may even exist in how the students they want to inspire to treat black teachers, or how the patients they are trying to treat treat the lives of black medical staff.

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