Diversity and inclusion

Prof. Fiona Murray and her colleagues have found that female STEM PhD students are less likely than their male counterparts to receive mentorship from top inventor advisors, reports Women We Admire. The researchers “emphasize the importance of early intervention and encouragement for female PhD students aspiring to become inventors. Programs that actively support female professors in their patenting endeavors can indirectly lead to a surge in female inventor PhDs, thereby plugging the leaky pipeline.”

Joy Buolamwini PhD '22 writes for The Boston Globe about her experience uncovering bias in artificial intelligence through her academic and professional career. “I critique AI from a place of having been enamored with its promise, as an engineer more eager to work with machines than with people at times, as an aspiring academic turned into an accidental advocate, and also as an artist awakened to the power of the personal when addressing the seemingly technical,” writes Buolamwini. “The option to say no, the option to halt a project, the option to admit to the creation of dangerous and harmful though well-intentioned tools must always be on the table.”

Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have found that “managers in a large retail chain saw women as having less leadership potential even though their performance reviews were better, on average, than those of their male peers,” reports Sarah Green Carmichael for The Washington Post. “Analyzing data on 30,000 employees, the researchers found that overperforming didn’t do much to improve women’s scores on leadership potential. Their bosses continued to underestimate them.”

A new study co-authored by Prof. Emilio Castilla finds that using stereotypically masculine or feminine adjectives to describe the qualities needed for a job opening has a negligible effect on who applies, reports Lisa Ward for The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a superficial intervention with little tangible effect,” says Castilla.

Prof. Nina Roussille has found that “women on average asked for 3.3% less than men for a full-time engineering job, with that gap growing to 6% for women with more experience,” reports Alicia Wallace for CNN. “However, when salary transparency was employed on the site and a median wage was given, the gap closed.” 

Nature reporter Abdullahi Tsanni spotlights Nicole McGaa, a fourth-year student at MIT, and her work leading MIT’s all-Indigenous rocket team to the 2023 First Nations Launch National Rocket Competition. “Our project and others like it will set a precedent at MIT that will help Indigenous students to bridge their identity with their engineering aspirations and career goals,” says McGaa. “I encourage other Indigenous students to be brave, approach your projects with courage and try incorporating your identity and values into your work.”

A new study co-authored by MIT researchers finds that journals and academic papers should be evaluated using a “diversity factor,” a metric aimed at improving representation across research, reports Patrick Jack for Times Higher Education. Jack notes that the researchers see the diversity factor as a “‘call to action’ for improved representation and to prevent the perpetuation of biases against certain subgroups.”

Writing for Times Higher Ed, Prof. Carlo Ratti makes the case that in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, big data and analytics could “help admissions officers quantitatively capture the kinds of disadvantages applicants face and the kinds of diversity they may represent.”

Lynette Seow MBA ’23 co-founded Safe Space Singapore, a B2B2C platform aimed at strengthening “mental resilience by providing tele-therapy care and prevention education,” reports Matt Symonds for Forbes. “Ultimately, I figured that if I wanted to build a Safe Space for people to come to, I had to be one to the people I met,” shares Seow. “If improving mental health is my mission, and a disproportionate percentage of LGBTQ+ people experience mental health struggles, how could I ignore drawing attention to this cause even if it meant being a bit more public about my personal life?"

Chancellor Melissa Nobles discusses challenges facing higher education, touching on the importance of diversity, inclusion, and affordability in higher learning, as well as her research on race and politics. Nobles notes that MIT’s signature ability is “to foster excellence in fundamental research and education and then to use that research and education to help tackle the world’s toughest problems. Our success rests crucially on our people. We support, we welcome, and we collaborate with some of the best faculty and staff around the world. And, of course, we attract the best students.”

Darby Dunn ’08 speaks with CNBC reporter Catherine Clifford about her journey from building rockets for SpaceX to working on making fusion energy a reality at Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). “For me, it really came down to wanting to use my energy to clean up the planet instead of get off it,” says Dunn. “So that was the huge shift for me to come to CFS.” 

The MIT List Visual Arts Center is offering free admission on Juneteenth for visitors to view three exhibits, reports Abigail Lee for The Boston Globe. “In the exhibitions, New York-based Alison Nguyen explores the cultural effects of cinematic storytelling, Philadelphia-based Lex Brown combines social issues and satiristic humor, and Berlin-based Sung Tieu uses different spatial configurations to reflect political questions,” writes Lee.

Sylvester James Gates Jr. ’73, PhD ’77 makes the case that “diverse learning environments expose students to a broader range of perspectives, enhance education, and inculcate creativity and innovative habits of mind. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) demand creativity—their research needs diverse thinking. This can be enhanced with equitable opportunities for all populations to participate in all institutions of higher education. My own life experience attests to this need.”

As part of an effort to address racism and discrimination, MIT researchers have developed a new VR role-playing project, dubbed “On the Plane,” writes Axios reporter Russell Contreras. "Our hope is that (players) move away from the experience with an understanding of how xenophobia and other forms of discrimination may play out in everyday life situations," explains CSAIL Research Scientist Caglar Yildirim.

Prof. Anna Stansbury and her colleagues have found that economics PhD recipients are more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree, reports Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post. “This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented,” explains Van Dam. “They’re particularly pronounced in economics, which has fewer underrepresented minorities among its PhD graduates (about 6 percent) than any other major field.”