AAAS-Sponsored Workshop Says Bias Still Present in the Modern-Day S&T Workforce

As a graduate student in South Asian studies in the late 1960s through mid-1970s, Ruta Sevo saw her fair share of gender discrimination. Out of fear of being passed over for fellowships that covered research expenses for fieldwork in India, she kept her marriage to a well-funded fellow graduate student a secret.

Anecdotes abound of blatant gender discrimination in that era. And while laws prohibiting discrimination have led it to be less rampant these days, it certainly still exists but in subtle ways. the basics of discrimination today. "The key message is that there is a lot of social science research that provides evidence for subtle discrimination," said Sevo, who co-organized the workshop with AAAS' Daryl Chubin, director of the AAAS Center for Advancing Science & Engineering Capacity.

Thirty-five participants from academia, federal agencies and non-profits attended the 19 August workshop at AAAS. The workshop updated the S&T professionals on research and issues related to discrimination in their fields "Empirical findings are not fixed for all time," Chubin said. "They evolve." Added Sevo, "We wanted to interpret some of the concepts that rise out of the research and equip participants with the ability to cite the literature and authoritative statistics."

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