[House Hearing, 116 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ACHIEVING THE PROMISE OF
A DIVERSE STEM WORKFORCE
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 9, 2019
__________
Serial No. 116-17
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
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Available via the World Wide Web: http://science.house.gov
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COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE, AND TECHNOLOGY
HON. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON, Texas, Chairwoman
ZOE LOFGREN, California FRANK D. LUCAS, Oklahoma,
DANIEL LIPINSKI, Illinois Ranking Member
SUZANNE BONAMICI, Oregon MO BROOKS, Alabama
AMI BERA, California, BILL POSEY, Florida
Vice Chair RANDY WEBER, Texas
CONOR LAMB, Pennsylvania BRIAN BABIN, Texas
LIZZIE FLETCHER, Texas ANDY BIGGS, Arizona
HALEY STEVENS, Michigan ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
KENDRA HORN, Oklahoma RALPH NORMAN, South Carolina
MIKIE SHERRILL, New Jersey MICHAEL CLOUD, Texas
BRAD SHERMAN, California TROY BALDERSON, Ohio
STEVE COHEN, Tennessee PETE OLSON, Texas
JERRY McNERNEY, California ANTHONY GONZALEZ, Ohio
ED PERLMUTTER, Colorado MICHAEL WALTZ, Florida
PAUL TONKO, New York JIM BAIRD, Indiana
BILL FOSTER, Illinois JAIME HERRERA BEUTLER, Washington
DON BEYER, Virginia JENNIFFER GONZALEZ-COLON, Puerto
CHARLIE CRIST, Florida Rico
SEAN CASTEN, Illinois VACANCY
KATIE HILL, California
BEN McADAMS, Utah
JENNIFER WEXTON, Virginia
C O N T E N T S
May 9, 2019
Page
Hearing Charter.................................................. 2
Opening Statements
Statement by Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, Chairwoman,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 9
Written statement............................................ 10
Statement by Representative Frank Lucas, Ranking Member,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of
Representatives................................................ 10
Written statement............................................ 12
Witnesses:
Dr. Mae Jemison, Principal, 100 Year Starship
Oral Statement............................................... 14
Written Statement............................................ 16
Dr. Shirley Malcom, Senior Advisor and Director of SEA Change,
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Oral Statement............................................... 31
Written Statement............................................ 33
Dr. Lorelle Espinosa, Vice President for Research, American
Council on Education
Oral Statement............................................... 44
Written Statement............................................ 46
Dr. James L. Moore III, Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion
and Chief Diversity Officer, Ohio State University
Oral Statement............................................... 57
Written Statement............................................ 59
Ms. Barbara Whye, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Vice
President of Human Resources, Intel
Oral Statement............................................... 68
Written Statement............................................ 70
Discussion....................................................... 98
Appendix I: Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
Dr. Mae Jemison, Principal, 100 Year Starship.................... 128
Dr. Shirley Malcom, Senior Advisor and Director of SEA Change,
American Association for the Advancement of Science............ 136
Dr. Lorelle Espinosa, Vice President for Research, American
Council on Education........................................... 147
Dr. James L. Moore III, Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion
and Chief Diversity Officer, Ohio State University............. 155
Ms. Barbara Whye, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, Vice
President of Human Resources, Intel............................ 170
Appendix II: Additional Material for the Record
Policy recommendations submitted by Representative Eddie Bernice
Johnson, Chairwoman, Committee on Science, Space, and
Technology, U.S. House of Representatives...................... 176
Letter submitted by Representative Haley Stevens, Committee on
Science, Space, and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.. 180
ACHIEVING THE PROMISE OF.
A DIVERSE STEM WORKFORCE
----------
THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2019
House of Representatives,
Committee on Science, Space, and Technology,
Washington, D.C.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room
2318, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson
[Chairwoman of the Committee] presiding.
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. The hearing will come to order. Without
objection, the Chair is authorized to declare recess at any
time.
Let me welcome all of you to today's hearing, and I'm eager
to hear from today's distinguished panel of witnesses, each of
whom is a leader in overcoming obstacles to bring more people
into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
studies and careers. So I thank you for the work that you do
and for being with us today.
There is no denying the fact that our success as a Nation
is closely tied to our capacity to build and sustain a highly
skilled workforce, one that is equipped to take on the pressing
challenges of the 21st century and to maintain our leadership
in the global economy.
Right now, we are facing grave challenges on many fronts.
We are battling an opioid crisis and seeking cures for diseases
like cancer. We are losing lives every day to gun violence and
suicide. We are rooting out terrorists and fighting back
against attempts to hack our democracy. We are racing to find
sustainable sources of energy and working to mitigate the
destructive effects of climate change.
Meanwhile, our economic competitiveness is threatened as
competitors like China invest heavily in science and make
advances in critical technologies like quantum computing and
artificial intelligence.
To solve these problems, we need a cadre of trained
scientists and engineers pushing the boundaries of what we know
and what we can achieve. We need computer scientists and
economists, biologists and mathematicians, engineers, chemists,
and social scientists. So far, we have gotten by with a STEM
(science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce
that does not come close to representing the diversity of our
Nation. However, if we continue to leave behind so much of our
Nation's brainpower, we cannot succeed.
The Census Bureau predicts that by 2045, over half of all
Americans will be non-white. Over half of all children under 18
will be non-white by 2020. As the rest of the country becomes
more diverse, the STEM workforce has been slow to respond. In
addition, I have watched with dismay for decades as women have
also made too few gains in the STEM workforce. Discrimination,
harassment, bias, and cultural and institutional barriers are
preventing many of our brightest minds from realizing their
greatest potential.
Today's discussion is long overdue. The last time the
Science Committee held a hearing focused on the issue of
broadening participation in STEM was in March 2010. Dr. Malcom
can confirm that because she was here testifying about the
challenges facing women, minorities, and persons with
disabilities at all levels of education and career development.
I'm sorry to say that in the years since this Committee
last addressed this issue, progress has been very slow. Some
fields have seen no gains at all. In 2010, women earned 20
percent of physics bachelor's degrees; today, they earn 19
percent. The share of engineering degrees earned by black men
is the same today as it was in 2010, just 3 percent. Hispanic
women are still earning less than 2 percent of bachelor's
degrees in computer science.
We have a lot of work to do. As Chairwoman of the Science
Committee I am determined to do what I can to move the needle.
I was very glad to be joined by my good friend and Ranking
Member, Mr. Lucas, in introducing H.R. 2528, the STEM
Opportunities Act of 2019, earlier this week. This bill
supports policy reforms and research and data collection to
understand and lower barriers faced by women and minority
researchers in academia and Federal laboratories.
The way I see it, we have two possible futures: One in
which we embrace the changing face of our Nation, and one in
which our leadership continues to erode. The choice is an easy
one, but the work required to get us there is not.
I look forward to hearing the recommendations and insight
from this wise panel on how we get there.
[The prepared statement of Chairwoman Johnson follows:]
Good morning and thank you, Chairman Lamb, for holding this
timely hearing on two of our most valuable renewable energy
resources, solar energy and wind energy.
Over the past ten years, costs of both wind and solar
energy have decreased dramatically, making them a vital part of
the energy mix of the U.S. According to a recent report from
Austin-based analysis firm TXP, solar and wind energy saved
Texans $5.7 billion in electricity costs from 2010 to 2017,
compared to what they would have paid if these renewable energy
sources were not part of the energy portfolio.
I'm proud to say that Texas now leads the U.S. in installed
wind energy capacity, with over 24 gigawatts of wind energy.
That's enough energy to power over 7 million homes. The wind
energy industry also brings tens of thousands of jobs to the
state, including jobs at several manufacturing facilities that
support the wind industry by making products like blades,
towers, and turbine housings.
All that being said, we still have significant investments
we need to make to continue to innovate on these technologies,
further bringing down their costs and making these technologies
even more beneficial for Americans.
In the wind industry, for example, we are exploring new
technologies like offshore wind, which has significant
potential for leveraging untapped energy resources near our
coastal communities, and needs important R&D investments to
help bring down costs. In the solar industry, we are continuing
to explore new types of solar cells made of advanced materials
with record-setting efficiencies, at affordable prices.
We really can make investments that are both good for the
environment, and for the economy. That's why I am looking
forward to hearing from the distinguished witnesses assembled
here today to learn about how we can support innovation in the
solar and wind industries, ensuring that these important energy
resources can play an even larger role in our clean energy
future.
With that, I yield back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Before I recognize Mr. Lucas for this
opening statement, I ask for the Business Roundtable principles
of ``Investing in People and a STEM Workforce'' and principles
on ``Pursuing Inclusive Innovation'' be placed in the record.
Without objection, so ordered.
Chairwoman Johnson. The Chair now recognizes Mr. Lucas for
an opening statement.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson, for holding this
hearing today to discuss how we can achieve the promise of a
more diverse STEM workforce in the United States. This
Committee has a long bipartisan history of supporting STEM
education for all, and I look forward to continuing that today.
When women and minorities face cultural and institutional
barriers to access and advancement in STEM careers, our
Nation's technological competitiveness suffers. The only way
we'll achieve our potential is by utilizing America's most
valuable resource: Our people. That means developing a diverse
STEM-capable workforce from every education level and from
every background.
STEM employment in the U.S. continues to grow faster than
any other sector, and we are struggling to meet that demand. In
order to meet it, the development of talent from all groups is
essential. More graduates with STEM degrees means more advanced
technologies and a more robust economy. But it's not just about
the economy. STEM graduates have the potential to develop
technologies that could save thousands of lives, jumpstart a
new industry, or even discover new worlds.
Women and the underrepresented minorities constitute a
substantial proportion of the U.S. population. However, our
STEM workforce fails to reflect this diversity. While women
make up half of the U.S. workforce, they comprise less than 30
percent of the STEM workforce. Similarly, underrepresented
racial and ethnic groups make up only 11 percent of the STEM
workforce.
This week, I joined Chairwoman Johnson in cosponsoring the
STEM Opportunities Act of 2019 to help address this disparity.
This bill requires more comprehensive data collection on
students, researchers, and faculty receiving Federal science
grants. This data will help us identify and reduce the barriers
that prevent underrepresented groups from entering and
advancing in STEM. It will also help us measure the success of
Federal STEM programs.
As many of the Members of this Committee know, I am a proud
graduate of a land-grant institution, the OSU, as we say, at
Oklahoma State University, not to be confused with Dr. Moore's
institution, the other OSU. The land-grant mission is to serve
students of all backgrounds and influence people's lives beyond
the boundaries of the classroom in service to the community.
In my home district, I have seen this mission brought to
life at both OSU and at Langston University, which is a
historically black college and a land-grant institution.
Minority-serving institutions like Langston are successfully
making strides in increasing the number of minority students
graduating with STEM degrees.
It is important that we also increase STEM opportunities
for American Indian and Alaska Native students, who are also
unfortunately overlooked in this discussion. The STEM
Opportunities Act of 2019 will bolster the NSF's Tribal
Colleges and Universities Program by providing grants to
enhance computer science education at these institutions.
Access to computer science resources and the development of
computing skills is critical for underrepresented students in
both rural and urban communities.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for being here. This entire
panel not only brings a wealth of leadership and expertise in
STEM education and workforce development, but they also provide
inspiration to students of all backgrounds who are pursuing
STEM careers. I look forward to hearing more from each of you
about how we can support, encourage, and develop the next
generation of STEM students.
Last, I again want to thank Chairwoman Johnson for her
leadership on this important issue. I know it's a subject near
and dear to her heart, and I look forward to working with her
on the STEM Opportunities Act and additional STEM legislation
focused on rural students in the coming year.
Thank you, witnesses, for being here, and I yield back the
balance of my time, Madam Chair.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Lucas follows:]
Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson for holding this hearing
today to discuss how we can achieve the promise of a more
diverse STEM workforce in the United States.
This Committee has a long bi-partisan history of supporting
STEM education for all and I look forward to continuing that
today.
When women and minorities face cultural and institutional
barriers to access and advancement in STEM careers, our
nation's technological competitiveness suffers. The only way
we'll achieve our potential is by utilizing America's most
valuable resource: Our people. That means developing a diverse
STEM-capable workforce from every education level and from
every background.
STEM employment in the U.S. continues to grow faster than
any other sector and we are struggling to meet that demand.
In order to meet it, the development of talent from all
groups is essential. More graduates with STEM degrees means
more advanced technologies and a more robust economy.
But it is not just about the economy. STEM graduates have
the potential to develop technologies that could save thousands
of lives, jump-start a new industry, or even discover new
worlds.
Women and underrepresented minorities constitute a
substantial proportion of the U.S. population; however our STEM
workforce fails to reflect this diversity. While women make up
half of the U.S. workforce, they comprise less than 30 percent
of the STEM workforce. Similarly, underrepresented racial and
ethnic groups make up only 11 percent of the STEM workforce.
This week I joined Chairwoman Johnson in co-sponsoring the
``STEM Opportunities Act of 2019'' to help address this
disparity.
This bill requires more comprehensive data collection on
the students, researchers, and faculty receiving federal
science grants. This data will help us identify and reduce the
barriers that prevent underrepresented groups from entering and
advancing in STEM. It will also help us measure the success of
federal STEM programs.
As many of the Members of this Committee know, I am a proud
graduate of a land-grant institution - The OSU, Oklahoma State
University. Not to be confused with Dr. Moore's institution,
the other OSU. The land-grant mission is to serve students of
all backgrounds, and influence people's lives beyond the
boundaries of the classroom in service to the community.
In my home district, I have seen this mission brought to
life at both OSU and Langston University, which is a
historically black college and a land-grant institution.
Minority-serving institutions like Langston are successfully
making strides in increasing the number of minority students
graduating with STEM degrees.
It is important that we also increase STEM opportunities
for American Indian and Alaska Native students, who are often
overlooked in this discussion. The ``STEM Opportunities Act of
2019'' will bolster the NSF's Tribal Colleges and Universities
Program (TCUP) by providing grants to enhance computer science
education at these institutions.
Access to computer science resources and the development of
computing skills is critical for underrepresented students in
both rural and urban communities.
I'd like to thank our witnesses for being here. This entire
panel not only brings a wealth of leadership and expertise in
STEM education and workforce development, but they also provide
inspiration to students of all backgrounds who are pursuing
STEM careers. I look forward to hearing more from each of you
about how we can support, encourage and develop the next
generation of STEM students.
Lastly, I want to again thank Chairwomen Johnson for her
leadership on this important issue. I know it is a subject near
and dear to her heart, and I look forward to working with her
on the STEM Opportunities Act and additional STEM legislation
focused on rural students in the coming year.
Thank you witnesses for being here and I yield back the
balance of my time.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Lucas.
Are there other Members who wish to submit additional
opening statements to the record?
At this time, I'd like to introduce our witnesses. Our
first witness is Dr. Mae Jemison. Dr. Jemison leads 100 Year
Starship, a global initiative seed funded through a competitive
grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to
ensure capabilities for human travel to another star within the
next 100 years while transforming life on Earth. Dr. Jemison
served 6 years as a NASA astronaut and was the first woman of
color in the world to go into space. She is also Chair of the
National Academies' study on ``Promising Practices for
Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Science,
Engineering, and Medicine.'' I welcome Dr. Jemison.
Our next witness is Dr. Shirley Malcom. Dr. Malcom is a
Senior Advisor and Director of SEA (STEM Equality Achievement)
Change at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS). She works to support research and practice to
improve the quality and increase access to education and
careers in STEM fields. She served on the National Science
Board, on President Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science
and Technology. Dr. Malcom also serves as Co-Chair of the
Gender Advisory Board of the U.N. Commission on Science and
Technology for Development and Gender Insight.
After Dr. Malcom is Dr. Lorelle Espinosa. Dr. Espinosa is
the Vice President for Research at the American Council on
Education (ACE). She is responsible for developing and managing
the organization's thought leadership portfolio and for
ensuring a strong evidence base across ACE's programs and
services. Prior to ACE, she held senior roles at the
Institution of Higher Education Policy, IHEP, Associates. Dr.
Espinosa is Co-Chair of the National Academies Study Committee,
``Closing the Equity Gap: Revitalizing STEM Education and
Workforce Readiness Programs in the Nation's Minority-Serving
Institutions.''
Our fourth witness, Dr. James Moore. Dr. Moore is Vice
Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer
of The Ohio State University. He's also the Distinguished
Professor of Urban Education in the College of Education and
Human Ecology, Inaugural Executive Director of the Todd Anthony
Bell National Resource Center on the African-American Male.
From 2015 to 2017, Dr. Moore served as Program Director for
Broadening Participation in Engineering at the National Science
Foundation. His research focuses on school counseling, gifted
urban multicultural higher education, and STEM education.
And finally, Dr. Barbara Whye. Ms. Whye is Intel's Chief
Diversity Inclusion Officer and Chief Human Resources Officer
for Technology, Systems Architecture, and Client Group. She
also leads Intel's Diversity and Technology Initiative to reach
full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in
Intel's workforce. She has led the investment strategy for
Intel's global STEM education portfolio with a focus on girls
and other underrepresented populations. She joined Intel more
than 20 years ago as an engineer.
As our witnesses should know, you will have 5 minutes for
your spoken testimony. Your written testimony will be included
in the record for the hearing. And so when you--when all of you
have completed your spoken testimony, we will begin the round
of questions. Each Member will have 5 minutes to question the
panel.
So now we will start with Dr. Jemison.
TESTIMONY OF DR. MAE JEMISON,
PRINCIPAL, 100 YEAR STARSHIP
Dr. Jemison. Thank you for inviting me here today.
And I want to start off by talking about 100 Year Starship,
which is about trying to make sure we have the capabilities for
human interstellar travel within 100 years that was seed-funded
by DARPA. And the reason why we're doing that is because I
believe that pursuing an extraordinary tomorrow creates a
better world today. It's by pushing ourselves today that we
have the ability to incorporate all of this incredible
technology that we're looking at.
I am an individual who has been exposed to the most
advanced technologies and bountiful economic resources and at
the same time a woeful pittance of human compassion. I am an
individual who has lived with people who have meager resources
and who've persevered in conditions that would try us all. They
relied on technologies that have been around for thousands of
years but they would share what they have with a stranger.
This is where I'm coming from because over the course of my
career and training as a doctor, as an engineer, I have
attended and taught in schools and programs and universities
which have been classified at different times as the best and
the worst in our Nation, Cambodian refugee camps, Chicago
public schools, Los Angeles Unified School District, Sierra
Leone, Dartmouth, Cornell, Stanford, and it's from that
perspective that I bring my comments.
When I left NASA, the first thing I did was start an
international science camp called The Earth We Share. Because
my mother had been a schoolteacher for over 25 years in Chicago
public schools. I recognized how important it was to do active
work around science literacy, that is the ability to read an
article in the newspaper about a subject, whether it be the
environment or health, and be able to understand it. And we
work with kids around the world.
It is important that we have greater representation
because, right now, STEM fields--science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics--are slashing a path to the
future, right? And that future is not necessarily one that we
can be assured is going to be beneficial. But the scientists,
the engineers, and those who fund and support them get to do a
couple of things. They get to choose the problems to be worked
on and researched. They get to choose the methodologies with
which that problem will be approached. They get to choose to
keep data sets or to throw them out as irrelevant or flawed.
The scientists and engineers and those who fund and support
them also have an opportunity to decide the priority with which
problems are addressed. They get an opportunity to decide and
evaluate whether a solution was effective or not.
So when you think about that, it requires that we have full
representation. It's not a nicety; it's a necessity because
we're losing so much of that perspective that we have to bear.
And when we look at what was really a difficult situation,
women and people of color in this country have contributed over
the years in countless ways despite being left out. So if you
look from Rosalind Franklin, whether you look at the women who
coded for NASA and did all the kinds of work in mathematics, we
know that they've done an incredible job. We see every day that
women have done an incredible job. We see every day from Dr.
Daniel Hale Williams and you can go on and on. African
Americans have contributed; people of color contributed. So
what we have to do is to make sure that we use all the talent.
I'm really excited about this bill. I want to throw in a
couple things. What child doesn't deserve an excellent teacher?
This really starts with education. With me today is Dr. Peggy
Brookins, who is the head of the National Board of Professional
Teaching Standards because we need to have education and
standards. I've been excited to work with Bayer Corporation
over the years. Solutions exist where we've been able to change
the curriculum so that we do hands-on science education, which
is the most effective way to do it. And the ASSET program has
lifted not only science scores but reading and mathematics
scores even more. The Earth We Share, which I talked about,
brought and trained teachers from around the world.
And then finally, if I look at what can I offer for the
bill, it ranges from making sure we think about skilled
technicians and labor who really make up most of the tech
workforce, to making sure that we hold organizations
accountable.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Jemison follows:]
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Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you.
Dr. Malcom.
TESTIMONY OF DR. SHIRLEY MALCOM,
SENIOR ADVISOR AND DIRECTOR OF SEA CHANGE,
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
Dr. Malcom. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and
Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to
testify. I'm Shirley Malcom, Senior Advisor and Director of SEA
Change at the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, the largest general scientific society in the United
States and publisher of the Science family of journals. Our
mission is simple: To advance science, engineering, and
innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.
I have spent my entire career working to address concerns
around equity in STEM. I do this partly because of my own
pathway from the Jim Crow South to years as the only in my
class, my major, in my lab group, in my faculty, in my
committees, on boards. I was drawn to science at the launch of
Sputnik because of the compelling vision and opportunities,
even for a little girl from Birmingham for understanding and
making a difference in the world, for earning a living and
making a life.
There are many more people out there from all backgrounds
and experiences who are drawn to STEM and who need to see a
pathway to turn interest into outcomes. STEM needs these people
for the energy, dynamism, and diverse perspectives they bring.
The U.S. research and education cannot be excellent unless
they're inclusive. Diversity improves the inputs and the
outcomes. The vibrancy and strength of the U.S. economy and the
health, security, and quality of life of our citizens are all
intertwined with the health of the scientific enterprise and
are products of the investment that this country has made in
STEM research and education. Our Nation has supported invention
and innovation across diverse fields and partnered with the
private sector producing the most powerful engine for economic
growth in the world.
But that is not guaranteed. At the core of the economy are
people, not just the scientists and the engineers and the
mathematicians in our colleges and universities and industries,
national labs and biomedical facilities but also the STEM
teachers, technicians, managers, financiers, patent attorneys,
and others whose collective efforts, grounded in science, fuel
the innovation economy. STEM knowledge and skills are not just
requirements for those of us in STEM but for all throughout the
workforce and across our society, from farmers utilizing
weather data and robotics to manage crops to those who care for
us when we are sick using high-tech diagnostic tools.
We can only get to this point by expanding the pool of
talent, tapping into the vast well of women and minorities and
persons with disabilities who are currently underrepresented in
STEM. We know that these groups don't participate in STEM at
levels that are reflected in either the population or in higher
education, and there are losses at each successive level.
This isn't just a reflection of interest or the impact of
personal choices. Choice is not what it seems. Choices aren't
always informed and may be driven by lack of opportunity or
stereotyping. Minority students who come from high-needs K-12
schools may not have opportunities to participate in programs
or classes that would enable them to explore their interest in
STEM. Poor early-stage preparation and uninspired teaching
compounded by low expectations can make it difficult to move
forward. At later stages the absence of role models,
institutional and classroom climate, a culture of weeding out,
isolation and the lack of community, incivility, bias, and
harassment can all prevent participation.
At AAAS we're engaged in efforts to address the systemic
problems that create barriers to success. Among these are
efforts to address the culture change within STEM such as the
Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment in STEM with 100
society members; making role models more visible as in the AAAS
IF/THEN and AAAS-Lemelson Invention Ambassadors programs, and
building community for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The most ambitious undertaking, however, is SEA Change.
Based on a model from higher education in the U.K., SEA Change
recognizes colleges and universities for work to improve gender
and race ethnic equity in STEM. Participating institutions
voluntarily develop a data-driven plan to address issues of
diversity, equity, and inclusion, aligning their plan with
specific context of the institutions. Institutional plans are
developed by rigorous self-assessment and using data to try to
understand where we have to go forward.
With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, AAAS and
Education Council are updating resources that assist colleges
and universities to try to figure out how to do this in ways
that are also consistent with judicial rulings and the legal
aspects that may come into question.
We see much within the STEM Opportunities Act that is
highly complementary with SEA Change, and we look forward to
working together to figure out how to make those synergies
happen. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Malcom follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
Dr. Espinosa.
TESTIMONY OF DR. LORELLE ESPINOSA,
VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH,
AMERICAN COUNCIL ON EDUCATION
Dr. Espinosa. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and
Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to
testify today on this important topic.
My name is Lorelle Espinosa, and I'm the Vice President for
Research at the American Council on Education with a 20-year
professional focus on diversity and inclusion in the STEM
fields.
Today, I'm here primarily in my capacity as Co-Chair of the
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's
Committee on Minority Serving Institutions, which recently
published the report ``Minority-Serving Institutions: America's
Underutilized Resource for Strengthening the STEM Workforce.''
I have submitted a copy of the publication's highlights, along
with my written testimony.
The report has many key findings, recommendations, and
strategies related to strengthening STEM education and research
at the more than 700 2- and 4-year minority-serving
institutions, also known as MSIs, across the United States.
MSIs, of which half are community colleges, enroll nearly 30
percent of all undergraduates, including a sizable portion of
the Nation's STEM students, yet are vastly under-resourced and
in need of critical STEM infrastructure.
In addition to their reach, it is important to acknowledge
who MSIs enroll, namely a large proportion of students of
color, many of whom are low-income and the first in their
families to attend college. Given this, many MSIs have
developed, with intentionality, ways to offer a rich set of
academic and social support systems for students that help them
thrive academically and prepare for meaningful and sustained
contributions to the workforce and to our society.
Of the committee's 10 recommendations to MSI stakeholders,
specific actions we recommend Congress take include, first,
incenting greater investments in MSIs and the strategies that
support their student success as outlined in our report and in
my written testimony. This includes new and expanded funding
mechanisms that strengthen STEM infrastructure and encourage
innovative teaching, learning, and laboratory experiences, as
well as substantial growth and mutually beneficial public-
private partnerships. Such investment requires significant
increases in annual appropriations to support capacity
building, funds for MSIs, and need-based student financial aid,
including scholarship aid.
Second, taking strategic actions to enhance the clarity,
transparency, and accountability for Federal investments in
STEM education and research at MSIs. It is in the Nation's best
interest not only to establish new and expand current STEM-
focused investments but also to increase the information
available about these funds and their impacts to the MSIs
themselves and to their many stakeholders.
Third, requiring that federally funded programs include
proper resources for a rigorous evaluation component in order
to measure the impact of these investments on student learning
and career outcomes for STEM graduates at MSIs.
For improvements in the short term, Congress should require
all relevant Federal agencies to identify an MSI liaison to
coordinate activities, track investments, and report progress
toward increasing MSI participation in STEM research and
development programs.
Next, undertake a production of an annual procurement
forecast of opportunities, including grants, contracts, and
subcontract opportunities and cooperative and other
transactional agreements that will enable increased
participation of MSIs in basic, applied, and advanced STEM
research and development programs. This report could serve as a
critical resource for policymakers, government agencies, and
MSIs themselves to assess and benchmark the impact of national
investments in high-potential but underserved communities. This
forecast report may further encourage other stakeholders to
partner with MSIs in new and innovative ways.
Next, report on the level of participation of MSIs in prime
or subrecipient or contractors in STEM-related activities,
including the type of procurement mechanisms and the current
investment totals that support STEM research and development.
Finally, Congress can track proposal submissions by MSIs in
Federal contracts, grants, cooperative, and other transactional
agreements and Small Business Innovation Research and
technology transfer programs.
In closing, as the Nation continues to grow more diverse,
the proportion of MSIs in America's higher education system
will continue to grow. These institutions are a valuable but
underutilized asset for the Nation, and with greater investment
and intentional support from Congress, States, and the private
sector, they can contribute in significant ways to local,
regional, and national economic development and job creation.
Thank you for your time and attention and for your
commitment to diversifying and strengthening our STEM workforce
in this country, and I look forward to your questions.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Espinosa follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
Before the next witness, I want to acknowledge the presence
of Dr. Rush Holt, a former Member of this Committee, who is now
directing AAAS. Thank you for being here.
Dr. James Moore.
TESTIMONY OF DR. JAMES L. MOORE, III,
VICE PROVOST FOR DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION
AND CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICER,
THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY
Dr. Moore. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and
Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to speak
with your distinguished Committee today. Again, my name is
James Moore from The Ohio State University.
It is a considerable honor to be here today, and I would
like to commend Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking Member Lucas for
the leadership of the STEM Opportunities Act. I also would be
remiss if I didn't thank Representatives Anthony Gonzalez and
Troy Balderson for helping to make my testimony possible. I
also would like to thank Representative Joyce Beatty from
Columbus, Ohio, although she is not a Member of the Committee,
but she is a very active advocate for broadened participation
in STEM.
How OSU is addressing the lack of diversity in STEM fields
is best illustrated through a pair of Ohio students, Shelby
Newsad and Omari Gaskins. Shelby grew up in Beverly, a village
of 1,300 in southeastern Ohio, not too far as the crow flies
from Representative Balderson's district. Like many rural
districts, Shelby's small high school lacked basic science
labs, and her only science courses were taught out of old
fading textbooks.
While Shelby's intellect earned her a Morrill Scholarship,
one of Ohio State's premier diversity merit scholarship
programs, she struggled in her biosciences major. As she headed
to special tutoring sessions, she questioned whether she would
ever catch up to her peers.
Now, Omari also grew up in Ohio but in urban Dayton, a
once-proud city now battered by opiates and joblessness.
Inspired by Marvel Comics and Iron Man movies, Omari joined a
robotics team after he left his neighborhood school for a
charter high school, smart enough to teach himself how to code
but without the means to pay for college.
Omari found a pathway to Ohio State thanks to our flagship
Young Scholars Program, what we reference as YSP. Now in its
30th year, YSP finds promising, low-income eighth-grade
students in some of Ohio's most vulnerable school districts
across the State. We provide our Young Scholars with ongoing
academic support during their high school years and later offer
them strong financial packages to Ohio State, provided that
they maintain certain academic standards throughout high school
and college.
The ongoing support during their precollegiate and
collegiate years allows students like Omari to pursue STEM
fields and other academic areas. Currently, 43 percent of our
Young Scholars are STEM majors. We have approximately over 800
precollegiate students and over 400 students who are--who have
matriculated at The Ohio State University.
Both Shelby and Omari--one white, rural, and female, and
the other black, urban, and male--teach us valuable lessons
about diversity in STEM. Lesson one, we need to be innovative
and inclusive in the way that we identify talent. We are losing
too many promising students before they ever reach our doors
simply because of their ZIP Code and the schools that they
reside--that reside in these communities.
Lesson two, when we find these students from underserved
areas, they're often unprepared for college-level STEM
coursework, requiring valuable human and financial resources to
bring them up to speed. Sadly, this can cause them to want to
quit college altogether.
Higher education partnerships with school districts like
YSP can help improve STEM education outcomes for students of
color, especially those who attend high-poverty, under-
resourced school systems.
Further, early intervention programs can be a major part of
the solution to the preparation gap. YSP intervenes at the
eighth grade to ensure that students are prepared for college
and offers ongoing academic support experiences.
Major companies are beginning to understand the importance
and significance of attracting STEM and non-STEM from diverse
communities. Hence, J.P. Morgan Chase recently made a major
investment in both our Morrill Scholars Program and Young
Scholars Program to ensure our students develop the right
skills and directions to enter the world of work.
My own academic research has studied key factors impacting
academic and career development of African-American males in
STEM fields, and based on this research, we found that family
influence and encouragement, positive K-12 experiences, their
own interests and aspirations in STEM, as well as their
academic experiences in college with their peers, college
faculty, and staff were all crucial in impacting factors for
African-American males.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Moore follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
Now, Ms. Barbara Whye.
TESTIMONY OF BARBARA WHYE,
CHIEF DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION OFFICER,
VICE PRESIDENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES, INTEL
Ms. Whye. Chairwoman Johnson, Ranking Member Lucas, and
distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting
me to be with you this morning. I'd also like to recognize
Representative Bonamici from Oregon and Representative Biggs
from Arizona.
It was a STEM education that rapidly propelled me and my
seven siblings out of poverty. I am the product of a STEM
education. I was born in the South to two amazing parents who
lived through segregation and racism like so many other black
families. Their options for finishing high school were filled
with insurmountable obstacles. Neither of my parents finished
high school, yet they pushed on, they instilled in us the
importance of an education. All eight of us became STEM
professionals, scientists, engineers, and executives. I sit
before you today as an engineer because I had access and role
models.
My great-great-grandparents were born enslaved in this
country in the 1800s. Recently, I visited their tombstones in
Conway, South Carolina. They had the wherewithal to name my
great-great-grandfather Favor and his wife was named Pleasant.
It is the same optimism that is a part of my inherited DNA that
I believe we as a Nation can bring to this challenge.
It is imperative that legislation expands opportunities in
undergraduate STEM education for underserved students receiving
degrees in STEM education. The STEM Opportunities Act does
exactly that, and thank you, Madam Chair.
For the proposed legislation to be successful, our country
should quickly shift from problem-admiring to problem-solving.
We have Einsteins all over our Nation who are untapped and who
have not been given access to an equitable and quality
education. As a Nation, we must put forth compelling, specific,
and immediate steps to achieve a different outcome.
Access to a quality education should be a basic human
right. With the rate of technology and the increase of STEM
jobs across this Nation, a STEM-ready student is a workforce-
ready student. However, students all over this country cannot
tap into the coursework that would put them on the right
trajectory. Every child should have coding as a school subject
and experience by third grade. Students are using technology in
everything they do. They should understand the power and the
opportunity it provides.
Intel recognizes the importance of growing pathways. For
example, we partner with three schools in the Navajo Nation and
the Oakland Unified School District as a part of our $300-
million diversity-in-tech commitment. Within 2 years, student
enrollment in computer science classes increased by nearly 400
percent.
Being bold and taking specific actions is in the DNA of
Intel. Through the leadership and commitment of our CEO Bob
Swan, the executive team, and employees around the world, Intel
has achieved full representation based on market availability
in the U.S. workforce a full 2 years ahead of schedule. We have
the ability within us to solve anything when we take action. We
know the power of making the impossible possible, and the power
lies within every single one of us.
As you consider the legislation this Congress, I would ask
this Committee to be bold in your actions and be transparent.
We must strengthen our systems and hold leaders accountable to
eradicate biases. You can hold programs accountable to ensure
that students at the most mature stages of the pathway are
successfully retained and complete their education as those
earlier in the pathway.
Ensure that HBCUs (historically black colleges and
universities), HSIs (Hispanic serving institutions), and the
tribal colleges have the resources to establish top-tier
programs in the STEM disciplines. Focus on the creative
programs and collaborations that emphasize hands-on STEM
activities that connect technology careers to real
applications. Authorize more funding to our STEM-based research
and faculty programs, especially those targeting the
underserved.
The STEM Opportunities Act is a good start and a testament
to this Committee's commitment to developing solutions to
support underrepresented minorities and women in STEM. Intel
will remain a committed partner to growing STEM opportunities
and solutions, and I look forward to continuing the work with
this Committee. Thank you for your time.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Whye follows:]
[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much.
We will begin our first round of questioning. And I'll
recognize myself for 5 minutes.
Despite a lot of attention being focused on the issue of
increasing the participation of women and underrepresented
minorities, progress has been very slow and in some cases
nonexistent. Why has so little progress been made despite the
amount of resources and attention devoted to these issues and
our knowledge of proven solutions? And you can start, Dr.
Jemison, and we can just go down.
Dr. Jemison. I want to just start off by saying I'm here
also as the Chair of a committee of the National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on how do we improve the
representation and the leadership of women in STEM fields. And
the report is due out in November, and I'm going to make sure
we--everybody gets a copy. But some of the things that we are
looking at is the fact that there are solutions. We already
know how to increase things. The issue is how do we get
individual organizations and institutions to enact them?
And some of the things we're finding is many times it has
to do with that perception that there's not enough support at
the head of institutions. We know that when there is that
support, things change. At Harvey Mudd College when Maria Klawe
came in, she was able to triple the number of women graduating
in computer sciences in 5 years, so it really has to do with
institutional support at the top and there being some
repercussions about not effecting change.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you.
Dr. Malcom. We have invested in a lot of intervention
programs over the years, and we do have a lot of answers for a
lot of the barriers that we see. The difficulty I think is that
we don't put the pieces together. This is one of the reasons
that we have turned to SEA Change as a more systemic
institutional transformational strategy. You can't have just
someone worried about the entering student over there and not
the graduate student over here. You've got to really look at
the entirety of the policies, the practices, and the processes
that are in place that put barriers in the way. And we utilize
the interventions that appear actually as solutions to a lot of
these things.
I think that this notion of having a scaffold for
institutions to look at all of these elements at the same time
is really powerful. That is the only way to begin to look at
these issues possibly at scale.
Congresswoman Johnson, we were pleased to have you at the
celebration and have you as the keynote at the celebration for
SEA Change. Those institutions had gone through a process of
self-assessment. They had gone through a process of actually
looking at all of the aspects. They might not have chosen to
deal with all of them, but they had solutions that had come
from the earlier investments that have been made around
intervention programs.
So I think that we've got to move this to a different
scale. We can't really up the numbers in a large amount without
having institutional change. And having them do a lot more of
the holistic strategies that it's really going to take to make
a difference. Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Dr. Espinosa.
Dr. Espinosa. Thank you for the question. The committee
that I co-chaired would say that we're not investing dollars
and attention into the institutions that are serving the
greatest number of students of color and low-income students,
again, our Nation's minority-serving institutions. These are
institutions that are under-resourced and don't have, in many
cases, the critical infrastructure that are needed.
The best practices that we know--again, as someone just
mentioned, we know a lot about what works in broadening
participation. We know that undergraduate research experiences,
for example, is a huge predictor of success, but we don't equip
many of the institutions where these students are attending
with the infrastructure to offer such experiences. So there is
a great deal of focus in our report on many of these successful
strategies.
I'll just also mention that MSIs not only offer these
experiences when they can, but they do it in a way that is
culturally aware and in a way that sets high expectations for
their students no matter where they start.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Dr. Moore.
Dr. Moore. I'll be succinct and try not to say some of the
same things, but there are four--five things that is really
important that should be thought about consistently. The first
one is interest. We know how to get students interested in
STEM, but it's not as much how do we sustain their interest.
And as they--from--these are K-to-gray kinds of issues. Even
the individuals who do obtain a STEM degree, oftentimes they
opt out of the field because of the experiences that they had
throughout the educational experience.
The other one is preparation. Preparation is a major issue
at the K-12 particularly, and sometimes it even seeps in at the
graduate and professional level. All AP is not created equally.
All honors is not created equal. Students matriculate at Ohio
State and they realize they have classmates who had the same
textbook, the same biology textbook in high school and that was
the first time that they have ever been exposed to it. So we
see malpractice going on throughout our educational
institutions in America.
The other one is experiences, making sure that they have
adequate educational and career experiences that is indicative
of what it means not only to go into a STEM field, to be a part
of the new frontier of STEM. If we don't think about the new
frontier of STEM, we'll just have another disparity even when
they get in STEM.
The next one is connections, making sure that they have
access to mentors that reflect and look like them. You know,
this is anecdotal. When I was at the National Science
Foundation and when we would do reviews of other--we would do
reviews of grants, if the professor was Iranian, it seemed like
all the students were Iranian. When the professor was Chinese,
it seems that all the professors were Chinese.
And increasingly we know that HBCUs, minority-serving
institutions, are educating a disproportion of underrepresented
groups, but what is happening when you're not--when most people
are not paying attention? The professors do not mimic the
students even at HBCUs like they did many years ago.
Internally, it's creating--it's not creating the kind of
relationships that they once had many years ago.
And last but not least, opportunities. Even when you--at
every level of the educational journey, students need to have
opportunities because where they don't have these
opportunities, they don't necessarily get to reach the level
that they--to reach their full potential. But if you--you know,
interests, your preparations, your experiences, and your
connections impact whether or not you can even access the
opportunities when they come to you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Ms. Whye?
Ms. Whye. At Intel we learned that what you measure
matters, and we learned right away that we can't hire our way
to success. Thank you--that we can't hire our way to success.
You actually have to focus on retention. We're one of the few
companies that's actually monitoring our retention and how our
women not only starting in engineering and engineering careers
at Intel but how are we being inclusive in our environment and
creating a sense of belonging so that we can also retain this
talent.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Lucas stepped
out. He will return. In the meantime, I will call on Ms.
Bonamici. I'm sorry, Mr. Brooks.
Mr. Brooks. Yes, ma'am. We do have Republicans here today.
I represent the Tennessee Valley of Alabama, home of the
Marshall Space Flight Center. We like to call ourselves the
birthplace of America's space program.
And, Dr. Jemison, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that,
to us, you're a hero and a role model having come from the
Tennessee Valley, Decatur, your birthplace, which is in the
Tennessee Valley, and we also named a high school after you,
Jemison High School just a few years ago. So that gives you an
idea of how highly we think of you and everything you've done
in your personal life and in your professional career.
I'd be remiss though if I didn't add that I'm a Trekkie,
and knocking the ball out of the ballpark was when I found out
you also were on a role of Star Trek, ``Second Chances,'' so
that's really cool, OK?
With that as a little bit of a backdrop, here's a question
for you if you don't mind. In your testimony you highlight the
demand for skilled technical workers, STEM jobs that do not
require a 4-year degree. You also mentioned that women and
underrepresented minorities are frequently unaware and left out
of pathways to these careers. What can be done to improve the
awareness and participation in these programs, and is there a
role for industry to play?
Dr. Jemison. Thank you very much for the question. My
father worked on Redstone Arsenal as a roofer before I was
born, so he was part of it, too.
Thank you for the question about skilled technicians and
skilled labor, which actually do represent the majority of the
STEM workforce. And in addition to that, they're very high-
paying jobs and women very frequently do not know about them.
And we also have a workforce shortage in those areas.
What can we do? We can, first of all, make people aware of
them by actually having those jobs represented in television
programs. When we talk about this--right now--we always talk
about 4-year degrees. I was busily writing notes about that. We
talk about 4-year degrees. We talk about academia, but the
workforce that actually built the Shuttle were not 4-year
degree engineers. They were skilled technicians. So we need to
make sure that those jobs are represented.
Then we have to make sure--I believe that community
colleges have the ability to do vocational work and are not
seen as a sort of a remedial place for what was not done in
high school so that people can get into 4-year colleges.
Actually, community colleges do incredible work with training
technicians.
Vocational education in high school could also be a pathway
for people seeing and understanding what are some of the jobs
that are available to them.
And I just want to go back to something that is really
clear. During World War II, women fulfilled many of the jobs
that were considered masculine jobs from, you know, the iconic
image of Rosie the Riveter. They also were the ones who
transported airplanes around. We need to understand that women
can do not only the biotechnician jobs, but that they can also
do the jobs in mechanical, welding, and building aircraft.
Those things are important. So thank you for that question. But
we need to get that out front and keep it in our eyesight.
Mr. Brooks. I've got some facts I want to give. I don't
know if we're going to have time for a question or not, but
this is rather troubling to me. And I just did this research
while I was sitting here. One was a comment by Don Lemon that a
put a fact then analyzed, and it was out-of-wedlock births. And
then looking at STEM and degrees and which races are going into
STEM. And it seems that there's an unusual correlation. Let me
run through it.
Asian Americans, they are number one with the lowest number
of out-of-wedlock births, and this is according to the National
Center for Education Statistics at 17 percent out-of-wedlock
births. They are also number one in terms of number of STEM
degrees at 33 percent of the degrees that are given out to
Asian Americans. Caucasian Americans were number two in out-of-
wedlock births at 29 percent, and then number two in STEM
degrees at 18 percent. Hispanic Americans were number three in
out-of-wedlock births at 53 percent and number three in the
STEM degrees at 15 percent. Native Americans were number four
out-of-wedlock births at 66 percent and number four in STEM
degrees at 14 percent. And then African-Americans were number
five at 73 percent out-of-wedlock births, and that's what
caused PolitiFact to look into Don Lemon's statements because
that's what he said. And number five in STEM degrees.
I hope that we can somehow or another as a body, Madam
Chair, also look into this societal issue and see what can be
done given this rather startling correlation between out-of-
wedlock births and then people who then go thereafter into STEM
degrees. And my time is expired.
Chairwoman Johnson. Ms. Bonamici.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you very much, Chairwoman Johnson and
Ranking Member Lucas, and thank you to all of our witnesses.
We often talk about our global leadership here in the
United States and that we have a country of innovators. And we
know that part of that is because of the groundbreaking
research that we have invested in, but we also know that we
need to educate the next generation to be innovative, to be
cutting-edge. I also serve on the Education Committee where
right now we're talking about affordable college and retention.
That's why I am back and forth.
But, Dr. Jemison, you said in your testimony, excellent
education must be universal. That's all connected to what we're
talking about here today. But we also know that it's not enough
just to educate world-class engineers, technologists, and
scientists. We need critical thinkers who are creative, who can
come up with new ideas and new ways to solve problems. So I am
the Co-Chair--Founder and Co-Chair of the STEAM (science,
technology, engineering, arts, and math) Caucus, will continue
to advocate for integrating arts and design into traditional
STEM fields to increase the competitiveness and the diversity
of our workforce.
Ms. Whye, I appreciate your reference in your testimony to
the value of Intel support for STEAM. For students to be
successful in the modern economy we want to teach them to think
creatively, and I think I want to point out that in the
district I'm honored to represent we have about 20,000 Intel
employees. There's a nationally recognized public STEAM
elementary school not too far away.
So we know that historically our science and technology
workforce has not been inclusive of women and people of color.
We heard a lot about that from the witnesses about the
persistent biases and inequities. We know how that's limiting
us because diverse voices help identify problems to tackle and
help find new ways to solve them.
So according to the recent report from the National
Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, 58 percent of
individuals in academia experienced sexual harassment.
Unfortunately, the prevalence of sexual harassment in the
sciences often undermines career advancement for women in STEM
fields, and I'm proud to support the Chairwoman's bill to
direct the Federal science agencies to implement policy changes
to address sexual harassment. I thank her for her continued
leadership.
Dr. Malcom, in your testimony you mentioned the engagement
of AAAS in the Societies Consortium on Sexual Harassment, and I
wonder has the consortium developed any new guidance, and what
can Congress do to make sure that we're not losing the valuable
scientific contributions from women in STEM because of an
unsafe working environment?
Dr. Malcom. Thank you very much for that question. AAAS is
engaged with the American Geophysical Union, the Association of
American Medical Colleges, and Education Council in this 100-
member consortium, and we have our colleagues from mathematics
and from all the other--many of the other fields there within
this member group.
We are actually developing draft policies right now so our
constituent member societies can have options about what they
do about different issues. It extends all the way from having
policies that allow us to affect behaviors, for example, in our
conferences. If someone--if they've demonstrated that the--you
have a bad actor there, to be able to--how do we manage that in
a way that we can in fact have a code of conduct for our
meetings.
Ms. Bonamici. Right, and I'm going to try to get another
question in real quickly.
Dr. Malcom. Oh.
Ms. Bonamici. Dr. Jemison, you mentioned the ongoing
National Academies of Science study addressing the barriers for
advancement. Through my work on the Education and Labor
Committee, we've made progress on addressing some of those
barriers, but I'm concerned about our lack of understanding of
issues regarding the retention of women and people of color. So
I'm going to ask you and Ms. Whye, we know the cultural changes
and willingness to confront the implicit and explicit biases in
the workforce are essential, but what policy changes can
Congress explore to improve the retention of women in STEM/
STEAM fields?
Dr. Jemison. So the report coming out in November we are
very excited about, and has some more concrete ideas, but
really quickly, part of it is holding people accountable for
what they do and doing bias training----
Ms. Bonamici. OK.
Dr. Jemison [continuing]. And recognition as part of
perhaps tenure processes, as part of processes for promotion so
that it is ingrained into the culture.
Ms. Bonamici. Right. And, Ms. Whye?
Ms. Whye. So quickly, I think where there is leadership,
accountability, and transparency of data anywhere you have the
opportunity to be transparent with your data and also holding
leadership accountable for the barriers that exist for women is
where you can support.
Ms. Bonamici. And you have--you call it a hotline or a warm
line or something?
Ms. Whye. A warm line. We actually have a warm line service
that we implemented inside Intel. It's an innovative service
that employees that are challenged by being retained inside the
company can reach out to these case managers and get assistance
right away so that we can retain them inside of Intel. Over
20,000 cases, we have over 80 percent save rate of our
employees.
Ms. Bonamici. Thank you. My time is expired. I yield back.
Thank you, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Lucas.
Mr. Lucas. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Dr. Moore, we often hear in this Committee about the
importance of mentorship and applied learning opportunities
like internships, apprenticeships. And you recommend that
colleges look to increase the amount of quality faculty-student
mentorship and research experiences to keep students in STEM.
Can you please elaborate on your recommendation and provide
some examples of how programs at the Federal science agencies
could support those activities?
Dr. Moore. Thank you for the question. Well, there's a new
initiative at the National Science Foundation called GRIP
(Graduate Research Internship Program), and basically that
initiative is trying to give individuals opportunity to have
real-time experiences, as we know that having real-time
experiences is one of those factors--when I say real-time
experiences, apprenticeships, internships, co-ops. They allow
individuals to go deeper in their content area, and not only
that, they begin to explore new opportunities that further
engage their interest in those kinds of things.
At Ohio State we have an initiative. It's a Big Ten
consortium called the Summer Research Opportunities Program,
and some of the institutions have a focus on STEM. Ours is a
little bit more broad, but a majority of the participants are
STEM majors.
We know academic achievement is highly correlated with a
relationship that a student has with his or her major
professor, as well as the number of contact hours. Having
research experiences is a strong indicator of whether or not
you'll go to graduate and professional schools. And those kind
of experiences, too often students foreclose on exploring these
opportunities because--based on what they think research is, so
it's very important--we know that when women and other
underrepresented groups have hands-on experiences, they're more
likely to stay in those kinds of activities.
So part of the university enterprise should really be
thinking about how do we develop an academic experience that
goes beyond the didactic but it has the experiential pieces.
And as I indicated in my earlier remarks, we're trying to do
that with J.P. Morgan Chase as a testbed where they come and
actually have office hours, and they're going to be engaged
with our students ongoing so they can develop the skill--the
workforce skills ongoing.
And particularly some students, when they come from
communities where they're the first in their families to go to
college or they're pioneers, sometimes they don't know the
importance of participating in these kinds of activities, so we
need--it's very important that we get diverse faculty so we can
begin to shatter myths and share realities and be role models,
but also it's important that we have support systems in place
in our institutions of higher learning that further support
students and help them guide them in certain places.
I'm here--you know, I like to share that at Ohio State
we've only had seven Rhodes Scholars in our history and, you
know, three were in the early 1900s, but the last two came out
of my office, and they came from parents of immigrants. And so
those things just don't happen. You can be very bright, have
high aptitude, and still don't perform at an optimal level. So
it's important that we build these kinds of things in the
curriculum.
Mr. Lucas. Absolutely. Dr. Jemison, workforces needs across
the country for aerospace and technicians are great, including
Oklahoma, and many good-paying jobs are going unfilled. Women
are particularly underrepresented in the aerospace field. Could
you expand for a moment on the barriers to women in aerospace
and how we should address that?
Dr. Jemison. Many times it's the perspective that people
have about who does what jobs, what they've seen visibly
whether it's in media where they see the professors, that makes
a difference. When you look at workforce, though, many of the
jobs that you see in aerospace, they have machinists there,
people who are riveting stuff, putting things together, and
these have been jobs that traditionally people don't think of
women as doing, but yet girls do as well as or actually better
than boys in math and science all the way through high school,
and many of these jobs are filled with people coming out of
high school.
And then there are apprenticeship jobs. So, we have to
actively bring in girls out of high school into these
apprenticeship kinds of programs because that's going to make a
difference and let them know that, yes, this is a part of what
you can do. What's really important about that is those jobs
pay well, and so women who put so much money into their homes,
into their children, would have even that much more to support
the future.
Mr. Lucas. Absolutely. I yield back, Madam Chair.
Chairwoman Johnson. Mr. Cohen?
Mr. Cohen. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Financial aid is real important for folks in diverse
populations to go to college. In Tennessee we have a lottery
that's dedicated to higher ed, and part of the lottery is
merit-based and some of it's need-based. How important is it
for these scholarship programs--and if you have them in Ohio
and if you're familiar with them in other States--to be need-
based in addition to merit-based and getting students the
opportunity to go to college? I don't know who should go first,
maybe Dr. Moore because you're--I know you're at The Ohio State
University.
Dr. Moore. Well, as you all--you know, Ohio State is a
land-grant university, and staying true to that mission our
President Michael Drake has made--as a major part of his
platform is to make college more affordable. In fact, I'm proud
to say Ohio State is one of the national leaders. And so for
every Ohio resident, we cover cost for tuition for every--every
Pell-eligible student at Ohio State, and it just went to our
regional campuses. And that is a--we've invested over $100
million into this, but I can say it's still not enough.
Mr. Cohen. What are the results that you've seen from that?
Have you seen higher graduation rates?
Dr. Moore. Oh, yes, our graduation rates are still on a
vertical trajectory, but not only that, as our institution
historically we've had attention between land-grant and
flagship. We're both. And so our average ACT is a 29.2, and
some alums will say I couldn't even--we became--we were open
admissions prior to 1987, and so it used to be your birthright
if you had a high school diploma in Ohio you could go to Ohio
State, but now it's more difficult to do that.
But what we found is not only when you have students, they
all have the capability, but they all don't come in with the
same kind of supports and traditions in their families. And
what we've done is we've put a major emphasis in creating
support structures for our students to ensure that they are
successful and so they won't--first-generation college students
oftentimes make unwise academic decisions not because they're
not smart. It's because they rely on the same people who are
just like them who had the same amount of knowledge. And what
we try to do is to reach out to students early and we try to
coach them ongoing to ensure that they're very successful. But
the financial piece is critical, but it's not the only piece
because it only covers tuition.
Ms. Whye. Yes, let me just chime in here. I think it's
critically important because for some of the students it
creates a choice for them studying versus having to work, so
the scholarships--and you'll see in my written testimony we
have a project with AISES (American Indian Science and
Engineering Society), which provide scholarships for our Native
American students. And in doing so, that scholarship helps them
in a couple ways. One, they get paid internships at Intel, but
also because they're having the paid internships, they're not
having to really choose between studying and also having to
work, so it's critically important.
Mr. Cohen. Dr. Malcom, please.
Dr. Malcom. Let me say that sometimes the amount of money
that we're talking about is not really a lot. It is not
necessarily just the cost of tuition. It may be that in fact
the students need book money but they don't have it at the
time, in which case they delay getting it--getting their books
until they could earn the money or whatever it is in order to
do it. Well, that puts you behind.
And there's also an increased number of students who are in
fact employed--working full-time who are also trying to go to
school, and that's a more difficult row to hoe. I am a Regent
at Morgan State and I chair the Finance and Facilities
Committee, so I see the kinds of things that come across
about--that can really stop students right in their track, for
lack of $500 for the books or $1,000 to be able to become
financial. So it's really a very critical thing that needs to
be looked at across the board.
Mr. Cohen. Thank you.
Dr. Espinosa. I might just add to the point that several
have made. Many institutions are experimenting with having
emergency funds available. For many low-income students, books,
and other critical needs for an education can be out of reach
because they have to spend money on repairing their car because
that's the only way they can get to school or they have to
spend money on their family. So having emergency dollars
available out of the financial aid office is also a really
effective strategy.
Mr. Cohen. All right. Have you noticed any----
Dr. Jemison. May I----
Mr. Cohen. Yes, Dr. Jemison.
Dr. Jemison. I just wanted to add one thing. There is this
romantic notion about working your way through school, and
people have done that. But the reality is that it is not
necessarily fair when those students are working and in classes
with people who do not have to work their way through school.
And our responsibility as a Nation is to make sure people have
access and opportunity to develop their talents that we're
going to need, all of us, in the years to come.
Mr. Cohen. My time is up, and I thank each of you for your
testimony. And it's what I--you know, we need to have more
need-based scholarships and people understanding that if you
give people a step up, it's really important not only for them
but for the whole society. Thank you.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you. Mr. Biggs.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I
appreciate you and the Ranking Member for holding this hearing
today. It's been very insightful. I appreciate all the
witnesses being here. I've read your testimony and listened to
your testimony carefully. I appreciate it very much.
And it's good to see, Ms. Whye, you're here representing
Intel, which is so important to my community and my
congressional district, and thank you. And I only want to say
this with regard to Dr. Moore and The Ohio State University.
Oddly enough, the largest engineering school in the country is
right there at Arizona State University, so I just had to get
that out, no competition from me, though. I just wanted you to
know that.
I am grateful that you're here. I always prefer--and most
people on this Committee have heard me say this before--that
the States and the private sector rather than the Federal
Government take the lead on a lot of the issues we're talking
about, particularly in expanding STEM opportunities. But I'm
confident that regardless of how we get there, I think all of
us in this room share the same end goal.
In order to remain internationally competitive, it is
critical that an increasing number of American students are
able to keep up with and actually in my mind ideally outperform
students from China, Western Europe, and elsewhere in the
developed and developing world. The data suggest the United
States has made great strides over the past decade even though
we have a long way to go, particularly in the postsecondary
level.
According to research compiled by the National Center for
Educational Statistics, graduate enrollments in science and
engineering grew 15 percent over the past 10 years.
Additionally, Latino, African-American, and female
participation in graduate STEM education increased by 122
percent, 35 percent, and 37 percent, respectively over the same
period. Certainly, there's more work to be done, particularly
in K-12 education, but this seems to indicate we may be moving
in the right direction.
And going back to this private sector for moment, I think
so many efforts to encourage STEM and diversity hiring should
originate in the private sector. And I appreciate Dr. Moore
mentioning what J.P. Morgan Chase has done to assist Ohio State
University, but clearly, Intel has been a real leader in this
area. The statistics speak for themselves. An 8.5 percent
growth in female workforce and 17.7 percent growth in the
number of historically underrepresented minorities just between
2015 and 2018 alone. Those accomplishments are testaments to
your leadership, Ms. Whye, and also Intel.
And I also wanted to thank Dr. Jemison for her comment with
regarding 2-year schools and their ability to turn out very
accomplished technicians in the STEM field. We use those and we
see them in my district.
Boeing has many machine shops around my district filled
with a diverse portfolio of workers because they've reached out
and teamed up with community colleges.
I'm most interested in learning a little bit more about the
Tech Learning Lab and Intel Futures Skills programs that you
referenced in your testimony, Ms. Whye, and I'm wondering if
you could give us a little more insight into your own
engagement with these programs and share with us why you think
they've been so successful at encouraging more young people to
pursue STEM education.
Ms. Whye. Thank you. And I'm from the University of South
Carolina, the other USC, and currently working on a Ph.D.
obviously at Arizona State University, so I got to give it up
for AZ.
Just two things. So what's important about both of these
programs and all of the programs that Intel is currently
driving, it's really about access and opportunity because in
every corner of our communities, even like the rural community
that I grew up in, there's a student there waiting to be
engaged. And I think far too often we talk about the narrative
of the students aren't interested when, quite frankly, the
students are interested. It's on us to bring the STEM and STEAM
to these students.
So both the Tech Learning Labs as well as the Intel Future
Skills, these programs are put in place to do that, to ensure
that in our communities and to ensure that communities around
the Nation, that we can give access to these students so that
they are developing the critical skills that they will need to
compete in this Nation and to help Intel with its future
workforce.
So, specifically, the Tech Learning Lab, you could think of
it as a really cool bus that's driving through the rural
communities in your neighborhood, and that bus is equipped with
all sorts of fun technologies that you can just geek out.
That's kind of the visualization for that.
The Intel's Future Skills program is very similar in that
it gives the students hands-on skills and entrepreneurship
skills so that they can do hands-on because the research--and
Dr. Jemison will agree with this--it's easier for our students
to see it if they can actually touch the technology and do the
hands-on project. So it's a very easy way to give our students
access, and I think all of us could play a role in that and do
more of that.
Mr. Biggs. Thank you very much. My time is expired.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. McAdams.
Mr. McAdams. Thank you, Chairwoman Johnson and Ranking
Member Lucas, for your leadership on the STEM Opportunities Act
to build our American workforce and to include more Americans
in our STEM careers.
Utah, my home, is also home to several life sciences and
medical companies, medical device companies, a robust
technology sector, and an ecology that provides unique
opportunities for environmental research. When I talk with
business and university leaders in Utah working in this wide
range of STEM fields, the top concern that I hear is about
their ability to recruit the bright students and the workers
that they need to keep their organizations and not to mention
our country globally competitive.
Utah has amazing community partners working to address
these needs, including our higher education institutions like
Salt Lake Community College, which has partnered with local
Title 1 junior high schools to sponsor robotics teams and to
provide more hands-on STEM learning to students. And businesses
in Utah's Silicon Slopes area like Adobe, which has engaged
students from the Ute tribe in workshops designed not only to
teach tech skills but also encourage their creativity and
passion for further learning, which I was interested in your
comments about scholarships to Native Americans.
We certainly have more work to do in each of our
communities and in Congress to ensure that all students have
the opportunity to study STEM and to pursue a career in
innovative and well-paying STEM fields.
So my first question is to Ms. Whye, and thank you for your
testimony. Your testimony notes that retention is a key issue
for Intel's and other STEM businesses' workforces, and I can
tell you that I regularly hear the same thing from employers in
my district. And, you know, certainly we need to do more to
educate and train that workforce, but once we do get them into
the workforce, to retain them and keep them in the workforce.
So I'm interested from your private-sector experience at
Intel, what programs or practices have helped Intel to create a
more inclusive workspace for your employees from
underrepresented backgrounds.
Ms. Whye. Great, thank you. At its simplest for your
employees from their point of view, they walk into your
companies as if they are a bank. Negative transactions result
in withdrawals from the bank. Positive transactions result in
deposits. So at Intel what we learn is when our employees are
at insufficient funds, they call our warm line. And the warm
line services there is backed by case managers, and employees
get to ask their questions about their pay, their managers. It
could be they're ready for the next job assignment. And through
using this innovative service--and I think all companies should
have a warm line, all universities should have a warm line.
And, in fact, the warm line equivalent for me at my university
was the engineering program office, right? You agree?
And so what we've learned about retention is really two
things. Because we've had this warm line in place, over 20,000
cases now, we now have predictive analytics that can tell us
what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong. And the two
top themes from the warm line are employees want to progress
and they want to have a good connection between them and their
manager.
Based on those predictive analytics, what Intel has then
done is we've retrained all 13,000 of our managers so that they
have the leadership muscle to ensure that they're creating the
right inclusive environments for their employees.
Mr. McAdams. So you started on my second question, which is
what kind of--type of training do you give to managers? In my
experience as an employer as county executive before coming to
Congress and we had 4,000 employees and leadership starts at
the top, too, right?
Ms. Whye. Yes, absolutely.
Mr. McAdams. Create the environment, but what type of
things do you do----
Ms. Whye. Yes, so we----
Mr. McAdams [continuing]. For your managers?
Ms. Whye. We have an in-house training that's called
Managing at Intel. One of the modules in that training is how
to lead as an inclusive leader. It's based on the content of
Amy Edmondson, creating a psychologically safe environment for
employees to bring their voices to the table and how you can
facilitate as a leader and be a coach as a leader as opposed to
not allowing your employees to be heard. That would be one very
specific example.
Mr. McAdams. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield
back.
Chairwoman Johnson. Thank you very much. Mr. Baird?
Mr. Baird. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to all the
very talented witnesses that we have here today. I appreciate
it very much.
My first question goes to Ms. Whye. You know, many of our
universities have programs designed to promote diversity in
STEM. Purdue University, for example, has a Division of
Diversity and Inclusion, and each department has their own
diversity program as well, including a Women in Science program
at Purdue's College of Science and the Minority Engineering
Program in their College of Engineering.
So my question to you is, you mentioned some of the
programs that Intel has been able to use to create a more
diverse STEM workforce. How do some of the things I just
mentioned above like at Purdue--are you able to work with those
programs? Are they beneficial to getting people into the STEM
programs?
Ms. Whye. Absolutely. So we have strong partnerships with
several universities, and what I would say about it is it's not
enough to get the talent in the door at Intel. So we haven't
had huge obstacles getting the talent into Intel. Our obstacles
have been more around the retention and inclusion of talent
once the students, women and underrepresented minorities, enter
into Intel. So we actually did a study inside of Intel to make
sure that we could get to the root of what were some of the
specific challenges in the way of retaining talent at Intel and
asking our employees who are staying at Intel what's at the
root of them staying.
And I think we can all agree on some of those critical
elements. It's really largely around having an inclusive
environment where I feel a sense of belonging. That's
critically important. The second thing is to have a sense of
community, so inside of Intel we have about 29 employee
resource groups so that individuals can have a place--a safe
landing to ask some of their difficult questions. And then I
think the third thing is just the leadership and the leadership
accountability, which is what I spoke about in my written
testimony about how we are training managers to be more
inclusive.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. My second question goes to Dr. Moore
and, you know, since we're getting these university priorities
corrected, I just wanted you to know, maybe you're not aware
that Purdue University considers The Ohio State University as
our eastern campus. I'm watching you recover from that.
This year, I introduced with my colleague and Chairwoman of
the Subcommittee on Research and Technology, Ms. Haley Stevens
the Building Blocks of STEM Act. And this legislation would
work to ensure that NSF provides research and insight into STEM
education during early childhood and particularly for girls.
So my question to you, Dr. Moore, is one of the lessons you
brought up was that students in the underserved communities are
often unprepared for college-level STEM work. Do you think
there is a real gap in the pipeline for our young children's
STEM education, and if so, what should we do to address that
gap?
Dr. Moore. Certainly. You know, ZIP Codes do matter
currently unfortunately. You know, when I was talking about
Shelby and Omari, Shelby grew up in Beverly, Ohio, but I didn't
finish. Even though she had struggles, we kind of supported her
through our office, and she's now a Ph.D. student at the
University of Cambridge in the U.K., right? And so, thank
goodness we have an institution like what we have to support
students and help them reach their dreams and aspirations. And
Omari is a constant on the Dean's list, even though--so great
minds come from every ZIP Code.
I think first and foremost our society has to believe that.
And how we can coach, everybody needs coaching. I know
Congressman Gonzalez, the former NFL star, Buckeye football
player, and Coach Drexel coached him up no matter how good he
was. And so I'm saying that that's the philosophy we have is
that we want students to reach optimal success regardless of
whether you're a fifth-generation college student or whether
you're going to be the first-in-your-family college student.
I think when we talk about we have to change the whole
ecosystem, and we know when families sometimes may not be able
to play a part, our schools used to play a part. But now our
schools are fragile, our communities are fragile, and it's
making it very difficult. So our land-grants, our public and
private institutions of higher learning, they are required to
do even more. But not only that, we can't do it by ourselves
without industries and community because they play a--it is a
part of the ecosystem.
And so some of the students, when you're first, you have
anxiety about being the first. You're going places that no one
has ever been before. And sometimes you don't know how to ask
for help. And it's not because--even when they have a 4.0,
Shelby was one of the top students in her high school, but you
come to Ohio State, you're talking about any given day we got
100,000 people near our campus, and it can be quite
overwhelming if you don't have the right support. So we're
working on that not only for students, incoming freshmen, but
we're even working on it how will we do a better job with our
transfer students.
When you go to schools that may not have all the resources,
the 2-year college route is becoming another--a preferred route
to get to Ohio State and Purdue and other places. And so our
institutions of higher learning have to do more.
But I will say this. I would be remiss, there's no
federally funded program that's probably been more impactful
for broadening participation than the Louis Stokes Alliance for
Minority Participation. What might be an idea how could we
think about that and expanding it, I have--our grant is $4.5
million. We have 10 universities, 10 universities trying to
share $4.5 million. It's very--it's not a lot of money. But
thinking about how do we leverage what we all do to make an
even greater impact.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. I think I'm out of time unless----
Dr. Jemison. I just want to add, and I don't know if this
is out of order, but to add something about the question of
childhood and what happens as we get children through it. We're
mistaken sometimes when we believe that we have to get students
interested in science. We come out of the chute excited about
science. We're picking up the bugs, the snails, the stuff in
the couch. We're asking what it is. What happens many times is
children go to school, instead of using this prodigious
construct for learning that all children have, it's very well-
documented for childhood, we demotivate them. We take the
energy away by teaching science in a way that just isn't
science. It's really about hands-on.
Besides parents, the most impactful part of this is
teachers. And many teachers in K-8 have not had science as a
specialty. And so we have to really make sure that we look at
teacher training. And again, I want to just go to the idea of
teacher certification, how do we support that so that teachers
actually are able to do the work that maintains a student
interest that helps them to build the kind of resilience that
they need to continue through? If we do that and build science
literacy, then we will have the pipeline, the resilient
pipeline that we need to go into skilled labor, 4-year degrees,
or post-doctorate degrees.
Mr. Baird. Thank you. I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher [presiding]. Thank you. I'll now recognize
Mr. McNerney for 5 minutes.
Mr. McNerney. First of all, I want to thank the panel for
coming today and for your work in this area. It's important.
STEM programs form a cornerstone of the United States'
educational system and were created to ensure that the United
States remains competitive in the global marketplace. However,
data shows that there is a growing gap in STEM-related
educational achievements between men and women. While women
earn over half of college degrees in the United States, they
hold only 28 percent of STEM-related jobs.
That's why I plan on introducing the Getting Involved in
Researching, Learning, and Studying of STEM Act--that's the
GIRLS STEM Act--which, combined with this bill under discussion
today, will help address this inequality. My legislation would
help establish a program in the United States Department of
Education to provide grants to eligible local education
agencies to assist elementary and secondary schools in
encouraging and preparing female students in STEM careers. This
would ensure that more female students participate in and have
access to STEM educational opportunities. And you know we're
leaving out a large block of very qualified, very talented
people that would help enhance our economy and our national
security, so it's very important that we do this.
Dr. Jemison, in your testimony you highlighted several
barriers to women in STEM. Included in this list is less access
to mentoring and higher service expectations. With so few women
in leadership positions, how can we balance the need for these
women to serve as mentors and role models and to make sure
their voices are heard without putting too much of a service
burden on them?
Dr. Jemison. So the comment that has been made a couple of
times is how important mentorship is and mentorship being
people who care about your careers and help you see new
opportunities. And very frequently mentors who are similar to
you are most effective, yet it can be very effective where
others mentor you as well. And so there needs to be some onus
put on everyone in academia or other professions that they have
individuals that they're responsible for in terms of making
sure that they are brought into the system.
So when I joined NASA, I was the first woman of color to go
into the astronaut program, and I had a big brother who helped
me to sort of navigate what was going on, and that made a
difference. And so I think that part of the way we decrease the
burden on women of color and women, period, is by making sure
that everyone has a responsibility. In fact, we could say that
it is the Department Chair in academia who should have the
responsibility for making sure that postdocs are coming in,
that students are coming in, and are actively mentored by
people who already have tenure, so to shoulder that burden.
So if you're a woman and you're in an academic institution
and then you're asked to do all the work around women and
community and keeping them in, and yet at the same time you're
having to do all your tenure work as well and you get no credit
for the community work, and maybe we can also look at how we do
a credit for community work. There are many type of ways----
Mr. McNerney. Thank you. I only have 5 minutes, so----
Dr. Jemison [continuing]. And it's something that we need
to do.
Mr. McNerney [continuing]. I'd like to get to another
question.
Dr. Jemison. Thank you.
Mr. McNerney. Dr. Moore, are there policies and practices
that you have found to be effective in increasing participation
of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM at Ohio State
that you believe could be practiced at other institutions?
Dr. Moore. Many of our academic units have mentoring
programs specifically for women, but not only that, we try to
create a community for women where they can draw on and share
resources, but not only that, what we're finding and right now
we're in this process of trying to revisit our benefits around
leave, family leave that--which is a big component that
sometimes women opt out of the academy particularly at the
professor level. But also we're thinking about other mechanisms
in which we can begin to keep people in the profession.
The other piece in regard to what we know that has been
very supportive is when you have representation, diverse
faculty attracts diverse students. When you look at the faculty
who tend to graduate the most women, they typically are women.
And I think that's why most of us do it the opposite. We focus
on the students rather than the faculty, but the faculty is--
plays a critical role in whether or not you get a Ph.D. or a
graduate degree because they make selections and grants, et
cetera.
The advanced grant is the big grant that we--we have an
ADVANCE program on our campus, and what they constantly do is
present best practices, exemplary practices that we can use on
campus. But the new initiative is we have programs specifically
for the male faculty because sometimes we have implicit biases.
We communicate differently sometimes that sometimes alienate
our women colleagues, so we have lots of programs like that on
campus.
Mr. McNerney. Thank you. I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Gonzalez
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for holding
this important hearing.
The beauty of tech in my opinion or one of the beauties of
tech is that we know for sure from experience and data suggests
this, that diverse viewpoints and diverse experiences help us
build better technology. I ran a technology company, and it was
clear the more diverse we were--and we did a great job on
this--the better our products were, the easier it was for us to
serve our customers. And so I think the fact that this has
become a national imperative in many senses is fantastic.
My first question will go to my friend Dr. Moore. There's
been a lot of crazy talk on who the real OSU is here. I mean,
would you agree that the real OSU is Ohio State?
Dr. Moore. Affirmative.
Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you. Now that we've got that out of the
way, and frankly I want to commend you. I am so proud of you
and the university, as I was reading your testimony and
listening to you today, to know that Ohio State is working so
hard on this and you're getting it right. I couldn't possibly
be happier sitting in this chair, so I just want to thank you
and everybody at the university for the work that you're doing.
I think the anecdotes that you shared are really powerful
because we're talking about two totally different backgrounds,
but ultimately, we're kind of driving toward the same goal. And
you have different programs, which makes perfect sense.
I want to read a part of your testimony. You mentioned--
``We found that family influence and encouragement, positive K-
12 academic experiences, their own interests and aspirations in
STEM, as well as their academic experience in colleges with
peers were all crucial impacting factors in African-American
male achievement.'' It strikes me--and I've heard this echoed
before. It strikes me that the family influence part is maybe
the hardest at the university level to kind of, I guess,
encourage. I guess I'd ask the question to you and to anybody,
how can we do a better job--and not just to the African-
American community but broadly--of making sure that our parents
and kind of local leaders are promoting STEM as well?
Dr. Moore. Well, what we do through our Young Scholars
Program, we recognize not only are you educating the child,
you're educating the family as well. In the State of Ohio we
survey all 12th graders across race, gender, urbanicity, et
cetera, and when you ask what individual has been most
influential in your educational/career aspirations every year,
it's families.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes.
Dr. Moore. So families are influencing your child whether
they went to college or whether they didn't go to college. And
so it's very important that we recognize the importance of
families.
And even when they have a college education, what we do,
what we're very proud of, we have the only center that focused
on African-American males in the United States, and I'm here to
say I'm proudly--when I first started we only had about 130
African-American males who had a cumulative 3.0 or better. And
today, we have 692 out of 1,291, nearly 50 percent of our
African-American males on our campus, athletes or nonathletes,
have a cumulative 3.0 or better.
And what we've found is talent--there are certain things
that play out in our school systems--I'm not trying to be
sexist or any of that kind of--that plays out for different
groups just like we hear my colleagues talk about women. But
minority males have similar experiences that sometimes they--
it's suppressed, and that impacts their educational outcomes.
Mr. Gonzalez. Yes. Thank you. And then shifting to Dr.
Malcom, so a 2018 recent report published by National Academy
of Science, Engineering, and Medicine mentions that 50 percent
of women faculty and staff at academic institutions report
having been harassed. We talked about this yesterday. You all
weren't here but this was a topic of conversation yesterday in
this hearing. And the simple question I've asked now for the
fourth time and I think, you know, we're getting close to being
able to produce something is what--how can we do better? What
can we possibly do to make sure that we're cutting those
instances down, and how can we foster an environment that is
more conducive to women? I mean, we should just eradicate this
from STEM if we could, right? So I'll open it up to you.
Dr. Malcom. I think that right now what we're seeing is
trying to operate on multiple tracks, trying to look at the
issue of preventing harassment, not just dealing with it once
it's there.
Mr. Gonzalez. Right.
Dr. Malcom. How do we change the culture, that is, within
institutions with regard to graduate students and postdocs so
that when they come through the system that they understand
that this is not a good thing in terms of supporting the
environment for STEM.
And the professional societies have stepped up in terms of
saying that--in terms of our fields that we do not think that
harassment has any place within our fields. For the disciplines
themselves to say that this is not to be tolerated is a major
point of movement, and we are very pleased to see that.
Mr. Gonzalez. Fantastic. Thank you, everybody, and I yield
back.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Ms. Hill for 5
minutes.
Ms. Hill. Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
Dr. Moore, the relationship between a faculty advisor and
his or her students, including graduate students and postdocs,
is highly imbalanced in terms of power. I'm really proud of the
number of women who are entering--young women who want to enter
STEM--the STEM field. This is happening in my district. We're a
huge aerospace center in my district and biotechnology, and so
we're seeing more and more young women who want to get into
that space, but we still have these huge inequities and
concerns around the balance of power.
Most STEM faculty manage that imbalance carefully and
respectfully but abuse also happens with little recourse for
students. If the student just quits or even if she reports
through official channels, her entire career may be derailed.
Minority, female, and first-generation college students are
especially vulnerable.
This actually happened to a woman who has worked for me
before who was in--she was working in a lab at her university,
and it was pervasive sexual harassment happening from her
advisor. Many women quit, they left. Finally, they stood up and
said that this was enough, they got together, they coordinated
around it. It went through the entire process at the
university, and at the end of the day, after going through
everything, the public exposure, et cetera, the man, the
advisor got 2 days off and that was it.
So direct sources of funding from fellowships such as the
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship give graduate students more
autonomy, but that helps just a tiny fraction of all STEM
trainees. What discussions are underway about policies to
better protect trainees and, more importantly, to reduce the
incidence of abuse of power altogether?
Dr. Moore. Well, I can tell you what is mandatory. We just
created newly--we just made the announcement. We just hired
someone at Ohio State, a new office called the Office of
Institutional Equity, and it's going to focus on those very
things that you highlighted. But not only that, it is now, as
Dr. Malcom was indicating, a major milestone for our
university. It is mandated, it is a requirement that all
faculty, all staff, all students have to take mandatory
training. And that's a major milestone.
And not only that, people have blind spots, and it's very
inappropriate, and sometimes people, they've been socialized,
they've been doing things for a long time, and they carry out
in places to where it was--it was inappropriate from the get-
go, and it--and they're doing it in public spaces that may
isolate individuals. So we're hoping that the training and not
only that this office is going--in this office, the person
reports directly to the Provost because we wanted to
communicate to the university community that this is a serious
affair and we want it to stop.
Ms. Hill. Dr. Malcom, yes.
Dr. Malcom. Yes. I want to also indicate that I think our
agencies now are also stepping up. When at times it has been
verified that there is a serious, credible allegation, removing
that person from a PI responsibility from actually interacting
with the rest of the space, the people in the space, I think
that seeing that the National Science Foundation and the
National Institutes of Health are beginning to move on those
issues is a real step forward because it's sending a very
different signal than we have had in the past, that in fact if
you get lots of grants that the behavior might be tolerated
because of the money impact that it actually has on the
institution.
Ms. Hill. Thank you so much. Do any of the rest of you want
to weigh in? You want to chime in? Sure.
Dr. Jemison. I was just going to comment from the work that
we're doing with the National Academies' women's study for
increasing participation. One of the issues we have to talk
about is that the power relationship between the faculty
advisor and the candidate is so strong that it's a place where
everyone should hold it as an egregious attack on the academia
when faculty members abuse that position. And in fact the idea
of holding their funding from the agencies accountable would
make a really big difference because money does push things
along. And if the agency said if you have those kinds of
issues, we're not going to fund you, it would make a big
difference.
Ms. Hill. So would you see a student, for example, who
doesn't feel like they get proper recourse from the university
or the lab itself having an ability to go to the funding
source?
Dr. Jemison. Well, I think that there should be
transparency and a requirement from the funding sources to say
what has been going on to show that you have procedures in
place for other kinds of requirements--government
requirements--that you are not harassing----
Dr. Malcom. Other compliance.
Dr. Jemison. Other compliance--that's the term--that you're
complying with not harassing students.
Ms. Hill. Thank you. I know I'm out of time. I yield back.
Thank you so much.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Balderson
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Balderson. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you all for
being here this morning.
Dr. Moore, thank you very much. I appreciate your time
here. It's always good to see constituents.
And one of the issues that drives the skills gap we are
seeing is the access to just basic broadband. We talk about
broadband, but let's talk about basic broadband. As you all are
certainly aware, if you lack access to the internet in 2019 you
are at a huge disadvantage in developing marketable skills. Of
the 24 million Americans that do not have basic broadband
internet access, 83 percent live in the rural communities.
Could you each talk about what your organizations are doing to
ensure rural communities have an equal opportunity to succeed?
Dr. Moore, if you would start, please.
Dr. Moore. Well, first of all, thank you for the work that
you do. And this is a very important topic. It's a part of our
ethos at Ohio State because we are a land-grant university. And
many of our extension programs work aggressively to ensure that
opportunities are available to our rural constituents. In fact,
all 88 counties in Ohio, they're guaranteed at least one full
ride in every county in the State of Ohio.
We provide a lot of outreach, but not only that, another
example of it is, as you know, that the opiates crisis has
plagued many of the rural areas in the State of Ohio, and Ohio
State is providing leadership to address those issues. But we
know some of it is a lack of opportunities, and that's probably
one of the biggest gears is to ensure that individuals have
opportunities in those areas.
But not only that, with our access and affordability grant,
it's ensuring that students won't foreclose on trying to come
to Ohio State because they can't afford it. We're trying to
make it even more affordable. So we have regional campus, we
have the Columbus campus, and our regional campuses, they
also--we just recently started access and affordability. It's a
lot cheaper on the regional campus, and plus, we have these
grant opportunities. So we want to make education accessible to
our students.
Ms. Whye. Go ahead.
Dr. Espinosa. Go ahead.
Ms. Whye. I'll just talk about our Navajo Nation project.
We have three schools that we're partnering with just north of
Phoenix, Arizona. We provide culturally sensitive curriculum,
and we also--what we haven't talked about today a lot is the
importance of a collective impact arrangement so that industry
plus academia plus other companies can come together because
it--not one company can do it alone. So in the case of the
Navajo Nation, we've partnered with Cisco, who actually helps
to bring the broadband to those schools that we're partnering
with because we think that's also important.
Dr. Espinosa. So just to put a number to it, one in six of
the Nation's undergraduate students attend rural colleges and
universities, and I think this is a group that goes under-
discussed and underserved. I like that you brought up the
partnerships that exist between tribal colleges and
universities and local business and industry as a way to serve
those communities, which are often located in rural areas.
Another thing that we're doing at ACE is trying to shine a
light on what are called education deserts, so these are places
where educational access is limited in terms of higher
education. There may be no options, there may be one or two
options, and one of the two might be too expensive or out of
reach for some of these students.
In addition to broadband, I think we've discussed satellite
campuses, also the ability for community colleges located in
these areas to have dorms where students can live. It's not
common to have dorms at community colleges, but many of these
deserts have that as their offering, and some of these
institutions have built residences.
I'll say one more thing about the power of dual enrollment
in these areas, and that's another role of community colleges,
which is to provide dual enrollment for the high schools in the
region, which allows those students to have a more promising
path to go to the flagship in that State or a 4-year
institution.
Dr. Malcom. We fully recognize the power and the importance
of technology now and how it can actually provide access that
wasn't possible before. And it isn't just to rural communities,
actually to urban ones as well. We have poverty places
everywhere.
And I think that in our case in the case of AAAS what we
have done in the past is always to try to not necessarily
design for the broadband. We tried to design for the lowest,
most ubiquitous technology that we can find, and that often
means that you're doing things on phones because that's what
people have. And I think that we need to look across the
spectrum as we are really seeking the opportunities until we
can get better.
Mr. Balderson. Thank you all very much. And, Dr. Moore, as
you and I know, Beverly, Ohio, where the young lady is
succeeding in getting her Ph.D. is from a very rural area, so I
yield back my time. Thank you.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Casten for
5 minutes.
Mr. Casten. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to the panel.
Dr. Jemison, I think we you an apology because with all of
this talk about OSU and ASU, there has been no recognition of
the Thayer School of Engineering where I got my graduate degree
from at Dartmouth College. And I think particularly in this
panel on inclusion, the historic underrepresentation on today's
panel is duly noted.
On a more serious note, I served for about 10 years on the
Corporate Collaboration Council at Thayer, and we were very
proud of the fact that it was the first undergraduate
engineering school in the country to reach gender parity. I
spent 16 years as the CEO of a clean energy company and was
fairly proud of the fact that merit doesn't discriminate, we
didn't either and, for totally selfish reasons, we had a
diverse workforce. And for totally unwelcome reasons, when you
treat all people with decency, people who have not been treated
with decency elsewhere give you more loyalty than you probably
deserve, and there are greedy reasons to do that, and I would
hope we would all do that.
I mention that not out of looking for praise acknowledging
a limitation, which is that in neither of those institutions
did the diversity that we had reflect the diversity of the
country. It reflected the diversity of the applicant pool. And
you cannot discriminate, and I'm glad you all mentioned
intentionality in your conversations that we have to get to,
and I want to start with Dr. Espinosa. In those higher
education institutions, I had a phenomenally diverse student
body that I went to school with and later, you know, had some
kind of a mentorship role with. It was largely diverse in the
international sense because that reflected the diversity of our
applicant pool. What do we need to be doing at the primary
education level to help ensure that the diversity of applicants
more accurately reflects the diversity of this country?
Dr. Espinosa. All right. Well, it all starts there, right?
It all starts where students start their journeys, which is at
the primary school level. I think there's a lot more that
higher education can do to reach that far down. Many admissions
offices, when they are doing outreach--and I know this because
I'm a former admissions officer myself--really focus at the
high school level. And by the time students get to high school,
they're already on an educational path that determines where
they will go to college and what they will study in college.
And this is especially true in the STEM disciplines.
So some of the promising activities that I've seen on
college campuses include more of a focus on making sure that
they're providing a pathway maybe not to their institutions,
certainly to their institution but to higher education overall
by focusing their activities and their outreach and the work
that they do with teachers and others that serves students in
these spaces, that they also focus there, in addition to the
pool that they get coming out of high school.
Mr. Casten. Thanks. If I could sort of move up the
educational chain, Dr. Moore, you made the point earlier about
sort of hiring people who look like the students and helping
with retention, which I wholeheartedly support. I'm curious,
Dr. Jemison, given some of the diversity of institutions you've
been involved with, are there any that strike you as being
really sort of exceptional best practices from the higher
education level at both reaching down to attract people and
then making sure that we retain them?
Dr. Jemison. So let me just sort of say that one of the
issues is exposure. Having students exposed to the range of
activities, the range of things that are included in STEM
disciplines. I want to comment on Dartmouth and Thayer School
of Engineering not only reaching parity in the number of women
engineers but actually I think one year actually more women
graduated. And part of that was the kind of education that's
given at the school, which has a liberal arts requirement for
the engineers, and they also have a lot of projects, which
really work with people seeing the application.
But I believe it's exposure. I cannot tell you of a
university that necessarily does things best. I can go back and
say that when universities allow students to come in on their
campuses and grade school, when they're in their early high
school years, it makes a difference. When programs are held
that purposely include students, it makes a difference.
But the one program I want to mention was something called
the Junior Engineering Technical Society, where they would
bring in junior high school students to the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and expose them to engineering for
2 weeks. It makes a really big difference because all of a
sudden you know that these careers exist.
Mr. Casten. Thanks. With a little bit of time, Ms. Whye, if
you could just quickly chime in then from the employer side,
the applicant pool, you know, if you aren't with--intent looks
a lot like those of us on this panel and--unfortunately. And
there are things that Intel can do as a large company, and yet
so many of our companies are small employers. What's your
advice to small employers who may not have the size of your
H.R. department to reach out with intent?
Ms. Whye. Yes. So there's a saying that likes likes likes
and likes also tend to hire likes. So one of the easiest things
to do would be to develop an inclusive hiring methodology. And
we have this inside of Intel, and what it looks like is the
applicant pool is diverse and inclusive. The interviewers on
the other side are also diverse and inclusive, and inside Intel
you also have to post a formalized req. We find far too often
that jobs are secured through the network or through tapping,
so where you can formalize the structure, be inclusive in your
hiring pool, to your great point, and also have diverse
interviewers that's reflective of that pool on the other side,
that action in and of itself has increased our ability to get a
more diverse talent.
Mr. Casten. Thank you. I yield back my time.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Waltz for
5 minutes.
Mr. Waltz. Thank you so much for being here today. This is
a critical issue to me. This is a critical issue for my
district and I think for the national security of this country.
I represent the 6th District of Florida, north Florida, and
spent our Easter work period visiting Daytona Beach State
College where they have a vocational and STEM training program,
also Pine Ridge High School, where we had a skills forum, but
then Cookman, which is a historically black college that
received university status in 2007 located in Daytona Beach,
and of course Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
I appreciate everyone's thoughts today at how to get at
this and how to do this better. I just want to emphasize--
again, I'm also on the Armed Services Committee. We are dealing
with a situation abroad where we need to combat extremism both
abroad and at home but also our near-peer and our peer
competitors in China and Russia, and STEM is critical to both.
And I have said and will continue to say that when we look
at the extremism problem, where women thrive in countries
abroad and in communities here where they are thriving in civil
society, where they're thriving in politics, where they're
thriving in business, extremism doesn't. It's squashed. So we
just need to get this out of the domestic, I think, forum and
get us squarely as a national security issue. I want to know if
you all agree with me there, number one.
And then, number two is we're looking at the 21st century
space race, which is near and dear to what we're dealing with
in the Florida and also in the Armed Services Committee. We
don't have a workforce and we're not creating a workforce to
compete, and that is alarming. We're going from half-a-trillion
dollars in our space economy to $2.7 trillion. That will be
dependent on space. The average person touches space dozens of
times a day and doesn't even realize it, whether it's banking,
markets, navigation, you name it.
So question one for you. The Administration issued a report
charting the course for success, America's strategy for STEM
education. I don't know if you've had a chance to see that
December 2018. If you have had a chance to see it, I'd love to
know, Dr. Malcom, I see you nodding your head yes. What do you
agree with, what do you think could be improved, what are your
thoughts on the strategy the Administration just put out?
Dr. Malcom. There are two major points to the strategy. One
is the focus on workforce, and the other is the focus on
diversity. And I would absolutely agree with both of them. I
think that the major issue is, though, how do we get there. And
I think pulling the pieces together across our agencies is
necessary, but it's not sufficient. The STEM workforce is a
national workforce, and yet we basically don't think nationally
when we do this.
In Ohio, they look at The Ohio State University, but they
also look at Ohio University and Akron and Toledo and all the
community colleges that--to fill in that space. And I think
that this notion about how do these pieces come together is the
reason that I have basically focused on a strategy to try to
operate at scale because we can't do this just one piece at a
time. And I do hope that we will start to focus in on how that
piece actually overlays with these larger issues of pulling the
rest of the pieces together.
Mr. Waltz. Do you think the report does a sufficient job at
describing programmatically how the Federal Government can help
and assist States get at this issue, or do you think it's
lacking, or where----
Dr. Malcom. I think that----
Mr. Waltz. I think--where----
Dr. Malcom [continuing]. It's not enough.
Mr. Waltz. Federally, what can we do from this position? I
understand the States have a huge role, universities, academia,
local, and personally, I think that's where education decisions
should be made. But what can we do to support specifically just
in the time that I have--or reinforce that we're already doing?
Dr. Malcom. Well, I think that a lot of the programs that
are already in place are--actually need to be kind of revisited
in terms of how they help the institutions put the pieces
together, but I also think that the business community has a
major role to play----
Mr. Waltz. Completely agree.
Dr. Malcom [continuing]. As a partner in all of this and
try to put these strategies together in a way that is really
coherent. And some of that is I think part of the intention
around INCLUDES (Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of
Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and
Science) from the National Science Foundation, but again, it is
necessary but it is not sufficient.
Mr. Waltz. I think we're doing a great job here of
describing the problem. I would love any follow up you could
send to my office on specific solutions that you've seen that
are effective or ones that we're currently frankly throwing
resources at that are ineffective.
Dr. Malcom. I----
Mr. Waltz. I certainly welcome that.
Dr. Malcom. I look forward to it.
Ms. Whye. So just one specific idea, and it's in my written
testimony and maybe outside the scope of this Committee, but
one low-hanging fruit I believe is encouraging the Defense
Department to leverage its ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training
Corps) program to help build a stronger diverse workforce and
tapping into that talent pool. So, for example, the Junior ROTC
that serves about 500,000 students, secondary students, most
often they're very diverse and underrepresented minority
students. By being able to go to that talent pool and bringing
STEM and IoT, Internet of Things or cybersecurity as a
curriculum to those students I think is a very low-hanging
fruit item.
Mr. Waltz. I think it's a fantastic idea, and thank you for
that. I yield my time.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you.
Mr. Waltz. I am over time. Thank you. I appreciate the
Chairwoman's indulgence.
Mrs. Fletcher. I'll now recognize Mr. Lamb for 5 minutes.
Mr. Lamb. Thank you. And I'll actually be happy to pick up
right where you left off, ma'am, because I was just at a JROTC
graduation on Saturday night in my district. I love those
programs, and it's nowhere near as large or widespread as it
should be. And really what I've seen in my short time in office
is sometimes it's actually more privileged and well-off schools
that are hosting these programs because of the resources that
they have, and so they're doing excellent work, but we need to
see it spread to the places that really need it the most.
So I don't know if you had anything else you wanted to say
about your experience with JROTC, but what I've seen
especially--and as a Marine, I hate admitting this, but the Air
Force programs that I've seen are awesome because they really
focus on the aerospace science at an early age, you know what I
mean, and Marines don't worry as much about complicated science
I guess. But go ahead.
Ms. Whye. No, what I would just say there is back to Dr.
Malcom's point about scale, and so I think what we have to do
is we have to look at where we have existing infrastructure
already ready there and in place for us to tap into. So for all
of us in high school, there were clubs that we were all a part
of, science club, math clubs, taking the curriculum that we
know is important for these students to get these critical
skills and moving those critical skills into those clubs until
we can get those critical skills into the curriculum of K-12.
I mean, if we wanted to get it right, we could start by
changing the curriculum in K-12. But absence of that, until we
can catch up, we could insert that into these places like
Junior ROTC, the math club, the science club.
And the students will tell you this, my experience working
with Intel and our science fair, they know that more money is
going to the athletic clubs in comparison to their science
clubs, so I think the more we can work from that and work on
that is also very helpful.
Mr. Lamb. Thank you. Dr. Jemison, I see you want to jump
in. I wanted to ask a related question anyway. Before I do
that, I also want to say another existing institution that I
think we forget about sometimes in these discussions is the
role of labor unions, which has been an enormous force for
progress on behalf of people of color for a very long time. And
many of these jobs are STEM jobs, you know, electricians,
steelworkers, sheet metal workers.
So I know you focused a little bit, Dr. Jemison, on the
role of apprenticeships and opportunities short of a 4-year
degree. Have you seen what I'm talking about with the role of
especially some of our more hands-on labor unions and
apprentice programs in the building trades?
Dr. Jemison. So I wanted to follow up particularly around
the military and its capacity to actually train individuals who
are skilled technicians and part of the skilled labor force. In
fact, so many of the jobs in the military, whether you talk
about in the Air Force or I know Navy Staff Sergeants, too----
Mr. Lamb. Just rubbing it in, yes.
Dr. Jemison. But also----
Mr. Lamb. All the other----
Dr. Jemison. But if people knew, women knew, girls knew,
coming out of high school about the opportunities that are
available in the military to be trained in some of these kinds
of professions, it would make a big difference in the fact that
those professions actually make more money than some of the
ones that they're geared to. And so if the military actively
recruited women into those jobs, it would make a difference and
also help them to develop a pathway.
In terms of labor unions, and labor unions have been
fantastic in some cases. In some cases, because of the
apprenticeship program, they have been a hindrance as well
because this is, again, one of those things where--what did you
use, the term like and like, right?
Ms. Whye. Yes, like and like.
Dr. Jemison. And so we have to have the conversation with
labor unions as well so that they start to broaden their focus
and their view.
Mr. Lamb. Thank you. Last question also for you, Dr.
Jemison, just because of your background, we found out when the
White House submitted its budget this year that they thought we
should cancel out the funding for NASA's Space Grants program,
which is a relatively small part of the overall NASA budget,
extremely small actually, and what it does is provide grants
throughout the educational system to encourage people but
especially underrepresented minorities, women, people of color
to go in to train them to become astronauts or to study
aerospace.
And we actually had a great example of this in my home
State of Pennsylvania where a recipient of a Space Grant
program award eventually became an astronaut just a couple of
years ago, I think maybe the first female astronaut from
Pennsylvania, a Penn State graduate. And so it just seemed to
me like a very successful program that was working at an
extremely low cost, and I was surprised that the Administration
advocated that.
Are you familiar with this program at all or have you met
people who have benefited from it?
Dr. Jemison. I'm not very familiar with it. I have met
people who have been involved with programs. But what I wanted
to add onto that is there has been this push recently for the
executive branch to pull funding for science education away
from agencies, so it was going to be solidified under the
Department of Education, and yet the Department of Energy,
NASA, they all have very fundamentally important and powerful
science education programs that have done wonderful work over
the years. They cannot be replicated under the Department of
Education.
So one of the things I think it's vital for us to do is to
understand that these organizations offer something that the
Department of Education can't, and removing the small, as you
said, amounts of money from those organizations is not going to
benefit the country at large. In fact, it's going to hurt.
Mr. Lamb. Thank you. Madam Chairwoman, I yield back.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. And now, I will recognize myself
for 5 minutes to ask a few follow-up questions.
I really want to thank all of the panelists for being here.
I think this has been one of the most informative and engaged
panels, which is also why I let some of the answers run over
because we really get to the interesting stuff when we hear
from you and about your ideas.
For me as the aunt of a niece in high school who wants to
become an engineer for--as a Representative from Houston whose
second piece of office art in my office here on the Hill is the
Women of NASA LEGO series that came at the same time as the
Whataburger table tent from Texas, two critical items of office
decor.
I am so pleased to have this group here and to hear from
all of you. And I represent the energy capital of the world,
and this is something I hear from companies across my district
and employers across my district, that there is a real need for
people in STEM fields and that we need to be bringing our
students along, that we need to have an emphasis on basic
science and very advanced science, and that's what we do in my
district. So I've been really interested to hear all of your
ideas.
And, Ms. Whye, you talked a little bit about partnerships.
I wrote lots of notes about these important words,
partnerships. Dr. Moore, you talked about the ecosystem and,
Dr. Jemison, you talked about teachers and mentors. Dr. Malcom,
when you were talking about the agencies, Dr. Espinosa, all the
ideas of these interesting ways we all need to work together,
and I think that that's a critical theme.
So knowing that we just have a few more minutes I was
actually going to ask about the ROTC idea because that is such
a great idea, and so I want to make sure that there's nothing
that you all had in your written testimony that we haven't
covered today that you would recommend as best practices or
policies that we should hear and keep in this record of our
hearing, any ideas of things that you didn't get to touch on in
the questions already that you would recommend, especially for
my district from companies to be able to broaden STEM
participation. That continues to be a critical, critical issue.
But anything else that anyone wants to add in terms of
partnership ideas or final thoughts, I welcome those.
Dr. Jemison. I just want to make a comment about public-
private partnerships. I've worked with Bayer Corporation for
over a decade on their Making Science Make Sense program, which
is about science literacy. And they have created curriculum-
changing programs like ASSET, but also programs that look at
skilled education like the Bay Area Biotech Partners, which
started with at-risk students in Berkeley, and these students
graduated as certified biotechnicians. At-risk meaning that
they were not expected to graduate. But these are the things
that can happen with public-private partnerships.
And, as Ms. Whye said, it wasn't just about Bayer. It then
started to encompass all of the biotech companies in the Bay
Area. So there is a rich capacity of companies to participate
across the spectrum from K-12 all the way into college and
postdoc.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you.
Ms. Whye. I'll just call out one more and kind of staying
with the collective impact arrangement because I think it's
important for--in the private partnerships and also in the
industry, the academia partnerships. It's also important for
those partnerships to align toward a very specific outcome and
also put in the diligence to have an owner, whether it's one of
the companies, or if it's a third-party organization that is
responsible for helping those partnerships come together and
align around a very specific set of measurements and making
sure that they're meeting on a cadence that they can go back
and track those measurements to make sure they're getting that
work done.
One such partnership that we have right now is called the
Reboot Representation. This is kicked off by Melinda Gates and
her organization called Pivotal Ventures. In that is multiple
companies, but we're all working toward doubling the number of
women of color in computer science degrees by 2025.
Now, each of us may do different parts and bring in
different dollars, but the machine is going toward the same
destination. And I think sometimes in the partnerships, the
partnerships are going in different directions, so we need to
partner with a specific outcome on the other side. And in that
partnership, by pooling all the resources together, you can
then choose the right proposals that can push you toward the
right outcome.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. Anybody else?
Dr. Espinosa. I would just add in terms of partnerships, we
have a very extensive discussion of public-private partnerships
in the report that I talked about today. We also talk about
incenting institutions to partner with one another, and that's
really important when it comes to graduate education. And the
reason we did this work on minority-serving institutions is
because that's where the students of color are.
So if we want to see more students of color in these
graduate programs that we've touched on today, we need to
create a pathway, and many institutions are doing this already,
but really incentivize the pathway to the doctorate coming out
of not only the 4-year minority-serving institutions but
starting with community colleges, which is really where the
majority of students of color enroll. So it's also the
connectivity across the institutions where they can further
learn from one another in undertaking this effort, so that
would mean creating consortiums and collaborations so that that
learning is taking place.
Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you very much. I see that I've gone
over my allotted time, so before we bring the hearing to a
close, I want to thank you all again for testifying before the
Committee today.
The record will remain open for 2 weeks for additional
statements from Members and for any additional questions that
the Committee may ask of all of you as the witnesses.
You are now excused, and the hearing is now adjourned.
Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 12:19 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
Appendix I
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Answers to Post-Hearing Questions
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Appendix II
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[GRAPHICS NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
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