WASHINGTON, D.C. – When it comes to increasing the number of minority men who pursue a career in the STEM fields, success largely hinges on a matter of money.
That was one of the key points made Tuesday morning at NASA headquarters during an event billed as the “Symposium on Supporting Underrepresented Minority Males in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).”
Getting individuals to enter STEM fields and careers is not as much an issue as paying them enough money to want to stay in STEM occupations, said panelist Dr. Nicole Smith, senior economist at the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.
“The key reason is pay. Let’s be frank about that,” Smith said during a panel discussion at the symposium titled “Implications from the Minority Male STEM Initiative.”
The initiative, also known as M2STEM , is a project of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, or APLU, that is meant for APLU to help institutions of higher education identify, retain and graduate more men from minority backgrounds in the STEM fields.
Smith—one of four panelists to speak on the implications of a new M2STEM survey released Tuesday—said that, while STEM salaries are competitive, wages have not risen as fast as they have in managerial, professional and health fields, which offer “greater financial opportunity” to students and workers with STEM-related abilities.
“But it’s not only about money,” Smith said. “Once you get to disaggregation by race and ethnicity and gender, the question of diversion and persons leaving the field becomes one of interests and values.”
