Black students face repeated racial microaggressions that may challenge their mental health and academic performance in engineering doctoral programs. Researchers attribute this to stereotypes and institutional climates that juxtapose their STEM and racial identities as incongruent. In this article, we analyzed the perceptions of environmental, behavioral, and verbal racial microaggressions of 33 Black doctoral students and postdocs, with a focus on their interactions with non‐Black peers. Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews with Black doctoral students from 11 Predominantly White Institutions in the United States. To analyze the experiences of our participants, we utilized two theoretical frameworks: Racial microaggressions and identity nonverification. Across the interviews, participants described various forms of racial microaggressions that greatly challenged their sense of belonging and identities as engineers. This research affirms the need to develop initiatives at the departmental and institutional levels to encourage more inclusive spaces for diverse students in STEM doctoral programs and to combat the types of exclusionary practices found in this study.
Despite national calls for increasing diversity and inclusion within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), inequitable recruitment and retention strategies remain commonplace. Inherent to many strategies is a lack of specificity in attending to the needs, desires, and cultures of individuals who are minoritized at the intersections of race, gender, and class through the use of broad, sweeping classifications such as “Women of Color.” Using critical race feminism, we engaged in a meta‐synthesis of recent peer‐reviewed, empirical STEM education articles that used the term “Women of Color” to identify (a) how the term “Women of Color” was defined, (b) who was and was not represented by this term and (c) and how research findings accounted for the presence of WOC. We provide a critical discussion of how terminology is used and a call for specificity in equitable and justice‐oriented STEM programming.
While there is evidence to support the existence of identity-based disparities, inequities, and biases in the academic journal peer-review process, little research supports the presence of this bias in the peer-review process for academic journals in science education.
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