Like many universities around the country, the University of Oregon intensified its efforts to increase diversity among faculty and students in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments in recent years. However, assistant professor of computer and information science Brittany Erickson said administrators still have a long way to go before the university achieves true equity.
Erickson received her Ph.D. in mathematics from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010 and worked at Stanford University, San Diego State University and Portland State University. She said that, from her perspective, UO is “pretty average” when it comes to working to increase women’s representation in STEM.
“I think a lot of universities want to do better,” she said, “and the UO is no exception, but we’re not there. Everyone, on average, is doing poorly.”
Erickson said that while hiring more women faculty like herself is a good start, the problem’s deep roots in society means there is only so much that administrators can do. For example, the university can only hire women who apply for positions, and if the applicant pool is mostly men, it’s less likely that a woman will get the job.
According to Catalyst, a nonprofit working to increase women’s workplace inclusion, women held only about 35% of all STEM Ph.D.s in the U.S. in 2018. In 2019, women held about 26% of computer science and mathematics jobs in the U.S.
Erickson thinks one of the reasons for the lack of women applying for STEM jobs is the absence of women scientists being portrayed in the media, perpetuating the stereotype of some professions as “men’s work.”
A 2017 study published by the Pew Research Center found a wide variation in women’s representation among different STEM fields. Women make up 96% of speech language pathologists and 95% of dental hygienists in the U.S., but only 8% of mechanical engineers. In computer science, a relatively new and fast-growing STEM job sector, women’s representation decreased from 32% in 1990 to about 25% in 2017.
According to a study published in 2017 by the National Science Foundation, Women of Color are even less represented in some STEM fields than their White counterparts. The study found that White women make up 18% of science and engineering jobs, compared to 6.5% for Asian women and about 2% for Black and Hispanic women.
“There’s this notion that in certain fields, you have to be a particular type of person to pursue them,” she said. “And that notion is reinforced in movies and TV. You don’t see a large swath of actors that can play a computer science professor — it’s like, one type of person.”
Erickson said the lack of female role models that young women have to look up to at the beginning of their careers may also reinforce gender stereotypes in STEM. She said that in all her years of school, she never had a female advisor. Only now as a professor at UO does she have a woman faculty mentor to look up to and help guide her teaching and research.
“I think having a supportive advisor in general is helpful,” Erickson said. “If you were a college or high school student and you saw more female computer science professionals, I certainly think that would help change our picture of computer science.”
Erickson said that the vast majority of her experiences with male teachers and coworkers throughout her career have been positive. However, she said that the competitive nature of her field led a handful of her past colleagues to try to hinder her success to promote their own, and that, unfortunately, the bad experiences she had tend to stand out in her mind.
She recalled an incident earlier in her career when she invited a male colleague to come to the university she was working at to conduct some research in her department. She paid for his travel expenses using her own research money, and when he gave a talk to the department, after which he thanked his research collaborators for inviting him to come work at the university, he failed to mention Erickson. She said he mentioned nearly all of his colleagues except for her — the one who invited him in the first place and paid for his trip.
Incidents like these are not uncommon for women in STEM, Erickson said. According to a 2018 report published in the Harvard Business Review, more than 80% of women working in STEM fields said that their contributions in the workplace were often overlooked or ignored.
She said that in her career, this has taken the form of being named last in research papers in which she was a major contributor. Usually, she said that the first author, who contributes the most to the paper, decides what order to rank the remaining authors based on how much work each contributed to the final publication. The first few authors often receive the most visibility, and, in Erickson’s experience, she said that if she does not vigorously advocate for herself, she is often listed last by default.
Tara Nye, a second-year Ph.D. student who studies seismology in the Department of Earth Sciences, said that while there’s still room for improvement, her experience as a woman in STEM at UO has been far more positive than her undergraduate geology studies at Brigham Young University.
During her time at BYU, there was only one woman faculty member in her department, and the rest were mostly older White men, she said.
“Here at the University of Oregon there’s a larger acceptance of women,” she said. “A lot of my advisors are women, and a lot of the younger faculty members are women as well. There’s a lot more representation here versus what I’ve been around in the past.”
With demand for STEM labor expected to increase dramatically in the coming decades, Erickson said she believes it’s important that all types of people have access to the opportunities that a career in science and technology can provide.
“We live in a technological age, where knowing things like computer science opens up doors in terms of careers and income,” she said. “So it needs to be more inclusive.”
Nye agreed and added that a diverse range of people can bring new ideas to the conversation that a homogeneous labor force could never provide.
“If everyone comes from the exact same background and has the same mindset, then I feel like they’ll tend to approach problems in the same way,” Nye said. “It’s important to have diversity because people from different backgrounds can bring so much more to the table.”
