“Outsiders at the Table”—Diversity Lessons from the Biology Scholars Program at the University of California, Berkeley

In 2017, at two campus-wide events to discuss diversity efforts in science, two senior scientists, both of whom were white men from separate institutions, declared, “We know what to do to fix underrepresentation in STEM, all we need is to do it.” I found what they said to be profoundly ironic. Their independent, nearly identical declarations captured the essence of why I think that, after 40 years of efforts to diversify science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), underrepresentation persists. Their words reminded me of when the special diversity edition of the journal Science was published in 1992, the same year that I cofounded the Biology Scholars Program (BSP), an undergraduate diversity program at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), that to this day I direct. In the editorial “Minorities in Science—The Pipeline Problem” (1992), the editor stated, with great certainty, “The low percentages of minorities in science reflect … that prejudice did exist,” and “The world fortunately has changed,” and “Under these circumstances the opportunities for able young minority scientists or women should be good in future years.”