Collaborative Research: SBP: Broadening participation: Reducing the consequences of subtle discrimination in STEM

扩大未被充分代表的群体在科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）领域的参与，是美国劳动力的人员配置、管理和效率的关键目标。事实上，非裔美国人和西班牙裔美国人占STEM劳动力的比例不到10%。拟议研究的总体目标是增加西班牙裔和非洲裔美国学生从事STEM职业的招聘、保留和准备。我们专注于少数族裔学生在STEM环境中遇到的微妙但重要的信息，这些信息会破坏他们的成功。我们独特地考虑了联盟或多数群体成员努力结束对少数群体成员的压迫，并代表少数群体成员提倡的方式，可以有效地解决微妙的歧视，从而最终支持少数群体学生的STEM兴趣，效能，成就和职场成功。总之，这项工作的发现将推动少数民族压力干预和盟友参与的学术研究。此外，它将提供立即适用的策略，以保留非裔美国人和西班牙裔学生在STEM中，这是增加美国STEM劳动力中少数族裔代表性的必要步骤。本研究的总体目标是制定和测试策略，通过识别和评估减少微妙歧视有害后果的盟友行为，提高非裔美国人和西班牙裔学生在STEM职业中的保留率。这种短缺的一种解释是，学生在形成性大学经历方面存在细微差异。在此过程中，我们建立并测试了一个概念模型，该模型独特地将归因歧义、压力和应对理论与有关盟友影响的新兴见解结合起来。基于组织科学相关领域的证据，我们提出了强有力的逻辑，提出微妙歧视的模糊性耗尽了STEM成就所必需的认知和情感资源。这一推理反映了对微妙歧视为何以及如何产生问题的首次透彻分析，并直接指出模糊减少策略是这些影响的强大理论驱动缓冲。我们将经验抽样和实验室实验相结合的互补方法来构建理论意义和实践有用的知识。这项工作将提供具体的、基于证据的策略来支持非裔美国人和西班牙裔大学生，从而提高他们对STEM的兴趣、效率、动机、成就，并最终提高他们在组织中的职业选择和成功。我们特别关注有动机的观察者——盟友——在减少对其目标的微妙歧视的后果，从而促进新的多样性科学方面以前未被审视的作用。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Broadening the participation of underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a critical goal in the staffing, management, and effectiveness of the U.S. workforce. Indeed, African American and Hispanic people comprise less than 10% of the STEM workforce. The overarching goal of the proposed research is to increase the recruitment, retention, and preparation of Hispanic and African American students for STEM careers. We focus on the subtle yet significant messages that minority students encounter in STEM contexts that undermine their success. We uniquely consider the ways that allies, or majority group members who strive to end oppression toward, and advocate on behalf of, minority group members, can effectively address subtle discrimination, and thus ultimately support the STEM interest, efficacy, achievement, and workplace success of minority students. In summary, the findings from this work will serve as an impetus for scholarship on minority stress interventions and ally engagement. Additionally, it will offer immediately applicable strategies for retaining African American and Hispanic students in STEM, a necessary step for increasing the representation of racial minorities in the U.S. STEM workforce.This research pursues the overarching goal of developing and testing strategies that enhance the retention of African American and Hispanic students in STEM careers by identifying and evaluating ally behaviors that reduce the detrimental consequences of subtle discrimination. One explanation for this shortage is the subtle differences in students' formative college experiences. In so doing, we build and test a conceptual model that uniquely integrates attributional ambiguity and stress and coping theories with emerging insights about the influence of allies. We advance robust logic based on evidence from the fields related to the organizational science to propose that the ambiguity of subtle discrimination depletes cognitive and affective resources necessary for achievement in STEM. This reasoning reflects the first thorough analysis of why and how subtle discrimination is problematic and points directly to ambiguity reduction strategies as powerful theory-driven buffers of these effects. We blend complementary methods of experience sampling and laboratory experiment to build theoretically meaningful and practically useful knowledge. This work will provide specific, evidence-based strategies to support African American and Hispanic college students, thereby enhancing their STEM interest, efficacy, motivation, achievement, and ultimately career choice and success in organizations. In particular, we focus on the previously unexamined role of motivated observers--allies--in reducing the consequences of subtle discrimination for its targets and thus catalyze new diversity science.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.