One thing I often think about regarding marine biology and racial diversity in particular is the gap in swimming ability in the US. From an article in the WSJ: “…70% of African-American children and 58% of Hispanic children have little or no swimming ability, compared with 40% of Caucasian children.” (article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704717004575268912714114950.html)

I don’t care to get into the reasons for this, as I don’t know enough about it to make an argument, and there is certainly a class dimension to this problem as well. But no matter the cause, this is possibly another case of students not having all of the necessary information; not knowing that ‘marine biology’ doesn’t have to mean ‘SCUBA and dolphins.’

When I tried to jump into the bandwagon, I quickly found out that, as a foreigner, I wasn’t eligible for 99.9% of the awards. It came to a point where I’d scan an award announcement for “Canadian citizen/permanent resident” even before I checked for applicability to my research field. And then, on my last year, I started job hunting in academia and keep running on the “proven track record of securing grants and awards” on the ad descriptions. Well…

Relating to Jessica’s comment about salary disparity, I was even more surprised by how many of these awards also had the prerequisite of…already holding another award! This is completely opposite from the Brazilian system, were virtually all research assistant/grad/postdoc fellowships forbid you to hold any other award concurrently. Year after year, the same names would pop-up as new award recipients on the dept. email list, while other students would work at retail and plant trees to be able to afford grad school, and keep doing their equally interesting research.

When I was in grade school it was still believed that teaching girls math would make them unmarriageable. Yep, true fact. While most teachers no longer take that approach, we still have the cultural hangover. Boys are discouraged because their obstreperousness names them less appealing to an overloaded school system where things like recess have been undermined. Girls are discouraged because there’s a HUGE amount of social pressure to be nice and appealing and that includes not out-competing the boys, or even other girls.

When I was in college I did so-so in pre-med elimination courses – I wasn’t happy but I was told it was good enough to justify continuing in sciences. On the other hand, I also knew that I had to maintain a B average or higher to keep my financial aid and while I might have been a successful science student, the risk of dropping grades eliminating my funding was too high. SO I went to liberal arts where I COULD be more sure of high high grades. This amounts to science being elite and elitist (in the negative sense) and punishes students who learn it but don’t grade well enough to get consistent high marks. The risk of being forced out of college by this is so high that it makes sense that it selects against exactly the kids we need in sciences.

Our education system now treats middle class and working class as an ATM for banks and investors and leverages those students with HUGE debt. Science is the source of most of the innovations that fuel our markets, but the people who profit are bankers and marketers, not ordinary researchers. That means that science is a high cost/low return education. Any kid smart enough to get a science degree is also smart enough to recognize the barriers of risk (losing college and grad funding), poor return (low pay for sciences), and low respect (we reward the people who sell the fruits of research but underpay the PhD and MS holders who do the research, and claim they should be satisfied with paltry funding).

The Koreans and Chinese are lauded for lots of math and science majors, and our pundits blather on about how to get American kids to learn math and science. I think it’s much simpler than culture. I think our kids are smart enough to realize that while we talk the talk, we refuse to walk the walk. We want our engineers but want to pay them Walmart wages. Guess what. Those kids are smart enough NOT to work hard and assume huge debts in order to be treated like fast food clerks by our market. There are other factors but it seems very likely that the most daunting problems in our education and in our science skills are market structural. If we start funding sciences like we did in the fifties and sixties so that researchers made as much as most bankers, and if we fund our colleges so that students aren’t always at risk of losing funding if they actually learn new and unfamiliar things, then odds are we’ll see a LOT more scientists and engineers as a result.