The American Scientist
By: Perry K. Wong
Tags: Data Visualization, Asian American, Policy, Pacific Islander

Blog & Visualization designed for Elevate: AAPI Data Challenge

As the population of our country grows more diverse, we assume that such diversity be reflected in educational institutions, media outlets, and workplaces. By visualizing data from the National Science Fdn’s 2015 report, Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering, we paint an image of the influence of S&E education on employment and whether or not race or ethnicity factored into decisions to go into the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.

Understanding these relationships have far-reaching implications for educational funding; intuitively, we assume that state governments would prefer to allocate funding for the fields most likely to result in employment and improved outcomes for historically underrepresented groups.

Recent projections by the U.S. Census Bureau predict that the nonwhite Americans will outnumber whites as the majority of the U.S. population by 2060. This trend, coupled with a growing demand by companies for degrees in specialized fields, warrants a discussion on racial representation in both the workforce and educational attainment.

Visual disparities

Thanks to survey data from the National Science Foundation, we decided to underscore the distribution of science and engineering (S&E) occupations by field and how it may have differed for participants by race or ethnicity. In particular, we wanted to know how AAPIs compared to other minority groups in S&E representation and report it to the White House AAPI.

Check out the visualization @ https://kvn219.github.io/elevate/

Readers will notice that the data heavily skews towards workers in the computer and information science field, who make up over 2.3 million of the 5.6 million S&E workforce. S&E workers in biology and life sciences come closest to computer science participants, yet computer science and information workers still outnumber them by nearly four to one. This pattern holds up across all racial categories and starkly contrasts with the composition of S&E degree holders, which showed that less than a quarter of all S&E students surveyed studied computer science and the bulk of students focused on the aforementioned biological and life sciences.

Opportunities for impact

Among AAPI scientists and engineers, Asian Americans a higher representation in S&E jobs than any other non-white racial category. While AAPIs make up less than a tenth of the U.S. population at large, Asian Americans make up nearly one in six employees in S&E fields.

Read our methodology @ https://github.com/kvn219/elevate

However, closer inspection of the data on AAPIs reveals underlying disparities masked by the initial overrepresentation of Asian Americans, and benefits in employment has not spread equally among all AAPI groups or genders.

Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPI) make up less than one-fifth of one percent of S&E employees, or one in 500. Meanwhile, NHPIs make up closer to one percent of the population nationally, making underrepresented. Additionally, divisions among genders showed that men overwhelmingly outnumber women in the S&E fields — although that is a trend that holds up regardless of racial category.

Even among Asian Americans, men compose nearly three times the number of scientists and engineers as women, the largest gap between genders among all ethnic groups other than NHPIs, whose male S&E employees made up four and a half times the number of female ones.