Kimberly A. Scott is a professor of women and gender studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University (ASU) and the founding executive director of ASU’s Center for Gender Equity in Science and Technology. The center is a one-of-a-kind research unit focused on exploring, identifying, and creating innovative scholarships about underrepresented women and girls in STEM. Having written and successfully won over $12 million in grant funding to support research about and programs for women and girls of color in STEM, Scott was named in 2014 as a White House Champion of Change for STEM Access. Since 2018, Scott has been a member of the NSF STEM Education Advisory Panel created to encourage U.S. scientific and technological innovations in education and assembled in consultation with the U.S. Department of Education, NASA, and NOAA. Center projects include the National Science Foundation-funded COMPUGIRLS; U.S. Department of Education-funded COMPUPOWER; Gates-funded project on African American Families and Technology Use; and NSF-funded Culturally Responsive Co-Robotics Program. Scott is also an Affiliate Faculty in George Mason University’s Center for Digital Media Innovation and Diversity located in Fairfax, Virginia. She was recently appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women of Color in Tech. Scott earned her BA from Smith College in art history and French literature, an MS from Long Island University in curriculum and instruction/elementary education and her EdD from Rutgers University in social and philosophical foundations of education, and completed the high potentials leadership program at Harvard Business School.
Reasons for the outcries to better prepare, equip, and/or support women of color–namely, African American, Latinx, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Alaskan Native, Asian American and Pacific Islanders–in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) vary. Irrespective of which rationale program developers, researchers, or funders adopt, their missions rest on responding to urgent cries clamoring for our country’s survival. In response, a movement has formed, refered to as the Race-Gender-Technology Movement (RGTM).
Meta-analysis will focus on funding trends targeting girls/women of color and STEM. The primary goal is to apply intersectionality as an analytical strategy to discover how funding agencies reinforce or challenge majoritarian narratives of girls/women of color in STEM. Using computational topic modeling, data visualizations will be created to meet the following objectives: 1) Illustrate how well-known and well-intentioned funding practices address race-ethnic-gender disparity in STEM through funding mechanisms; 2) Illuminate how and when funding agencies emphasize the disparity of girls/women of color in STEM; and 3) Identify methods funders can successfully invest in the RGTM initiatives using different lexicons.
