Abstract
In Equity in Science: Representation, Culture, and the Dynamics of Change in Graduate Education, Julie Posselt focuses on good practices for pursuing racial and gender equity in graduate education in the sciences. She clearly seeks ways to attain equity, a higher and more significant bar than diversity and inclusion. She addresses the problem of “revolving doors” (although she does not refer to it as such). This is the phenomenon of programs or institutions increasing the integration of their entering groups—often through hard work—but failing to build the necessarily equitable cultures and structures to retain them. Instead, numbers indicating diversity are kept up by continual active recruiting. As she notes, this approach fails in the long run, as recruitment efforts are met by the lack of positive reports from current students.
Just as recruitment cannot succeed in the long run without attention to factors that contribute to retention and success, Posselt argues convincingly that efforts cannot succeed if they are made solely from the bottom up (e.g., by a few individuals on the faculty who are labelled as diversity leaders), or from the top down (institutional or disciplinary society leadership). Change must come from both directions, as well as from “the inside out”—by changes in the values and views of individual participants in the groups and organizations attempting change. Her insistence on change from the inside out is the volume’s outstanding contribution.
These themes are well supported by her reports, in Chapters Three through Six, of several studies of efforts at bottom-up, top-down, and inside-out change. The examples have been chosen because they are outliers, succeeding more than most efforts have. In a chapter illuminating bottom-up change (and forces against it), Posselt uses observation and interviews of a field-based geoscience course, small-group level, and clearly develops the ways in which the hidden curriculum is communicated. The interviews with women students and students of color bring a rich understanding of students’ agency and the factors that influence decisions about when and how to deal with inequitable treatment.
In a comparative study, taking a top-down approach, Posselt effectively describes how a chemistry department and a psychology department attempted (in different ways and with very different outcomes) to have a more diverse graduate student population. Her description and analysis of an applied physics program that has been particularly successful in its pursuit of equity makes clear what an inside-out change approach entails. She goes on to departmental change and astronomy and physics disciplinary societies’ equity-focused initiatives and makes the point that each initiative is stronger if the other dimensions are also kept in mind. The final data-rich chapter reports on two disciplinary societies with which Posselt has worked on equity efforts. One exemplifies a bottom-up approach to change and the other a top-down; problems associated with each approach as well as their benefits are described.
The volume ends with recommendations for making admissions more equitable and for better supporting the students, once admitted, through a holistic approach. Posselt also provides a set of recommendations for ways to improve the equity and the effectiveness of collaborations aimed at equity for STEM graduate students.
It is unclear what audience the book is aimed at. At points it seems to aim at faculty in the (non-social) sciences, particularly with the inclusion of an extended use of concepts based in quantum theory as metaphors. And, certainly, the data chapters are written in a way to make an important and accessible argument for the thesis of the simultaneous need for bottom-up, top-down, and inside-out efforts. However, the book is less successful when presenting an (unnecessarily ambitious) overview of relevant concepts and theories from the sociology of science and the study of organizational change, with unnecessarily specialized language. Thus, the more theoretical chapters (One, Two, and Seven) are likely to discourage non-social science readers. Simultaneously, those chapters would have been more engaging for social science readers if they included fewer concepts and theoretical approaches and developed them more deeply.
Finally, the author has missed an important opportunity to include work on the dynamics of change focused on equity among science faculty. Notably, the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE Program has supported efforts at many institutions aimed at the successful integration of women and people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups into STEM faculties. The largest awards made have been for “institutional transformation”; and while the initiatives have focused on approaching equity in faculty positions, many mirror the kinds of work that Posselt reports on. One important example that would be useful for readers is work by ADVANCE awardees to introduce and translate relevant social science material to non-social scientists. The University of Michigan ADVANCE program included its STRIDE initiative (the Committee on Strategies and Tactics for Recruiting to Improve Diversity and Excellence) in its initial proposal for funding, more than twenty years ago. STRIDE has been adopted or adapted by many other institutions (with or without NSF funding) to provide empirically based insights about the processes that affect the successful recruitment of women and people of color and the equitable treatment that facilitates retention and advancement. In fact, related directly to Posselt’s focus, the University of Michigan’s graduate school recognized the pertinence of STRIDE to increasing equity in graduate programs and asked the ADVANCE program to adapt STRIDE for the training of people working on graduate admissions.
Similarly, Posselt discusses the importance of using rubrics in admissions decision-making and the need to take decision-making slowly. Many ADVANCE programs have included faculty recruitment training that embeds these principles (as have other institutions with equity-focused leadership). Finally, ADVANCE has fostered the development of a wide variety of approaches to mentoring. Each of these is well documented in the growing literature, much of it produced by scholars affiliated with one or another ADVANCE project. For example, faculty and administrators from the non-social sciences would find very useful, clearly written accounts in Stewart and Valian’s An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence (2018).