The Centers for Economic Excellence Program has drawn cheers from higher education and political officials as a model for establishing South Carolina as a base for research that’s groundbreaking and creates jobs.
The program, paid for with lottery and private money, has brought in nearly 5,000 new jobs that pay an average of $63,000 per year, program supporters say. And the best-paying of those jobs are those held by endowed chairs, nationally recognized research experts hired by the state’s three research universities.
But, of the 34 endowed chairs hired so far, only three have been women and none has been African-American.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Joan Herbers, president of the Association for Women in Science, says of the CoEE’s track record in hiring women. “It disheartens me.”
Higher education and industry officials sometimes disagree on whether there are too few African-Americans and women in the sciences or if the problem is that those making the hiring decisions simply overlook them.
Herbers says she does not believe overt sexism is the reason comparatively few women are hired for high-level jobs like the ones in South Carolina’s CoEE program. Instead, she argues that hiring officials simply don’t extend themselves enough when they consider candidates.
“When you do not give explicit directions about diversity, it gets ignored,” she says. “People tend to think of people they know. And the people making the decision are themselves White and male.”
