Georgia Tech’s Gary May: Striving for Racial Parity in STEM

Mentoring and other programs are key to building the ranks of minority and female students in STEM, Georgia Tech’s engineering dean says.

GARY MAY, THE DEAN OF Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, stood out as an undergrad – and not in the way he wanted.

“You go to your class and you’re the only black kid – that’s fairly stark,” he says.

It’s been more than three decades since that freshman year, yet May’s experience remains painfully familiar to thousands of other students and new hires. Despite years of investment and even some modest progress, women and people of color still lag far behind white and Asian men in science, technology, engineering and math education and hiring, or STEM, according to the 2015 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index.

The culprits are legion: historic education and housing policies that robbed schools and whole communities of the resources for robust STEM programs; perceptions of what programmers and mathematicians “should” look like; hosts of implicit and explicit biases.

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