Latinas in Academia: A Triple Challenge

A Unique Set of Pressures

Imagine you're a woman of color in academia: you've worked hard to build your career, but even when you're doing your best work, it's not enough. You're always being challenged, always being pushed. You never feel comfortable speaking up in meetings. When you finally do speak up, no one is listening. As a result, your ideas are ignored, and you become invisible.

This is the reality for many Hispanic women in academic science careers. The industry is overwhelmingly white and male, and implicit bias against Hispanic women pervades all aspects of their work lives — from research to teaching to hiring other people.

Catherine M. Hulshof, PhD Biology Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, knows this struggle all too well: “Everything I do, my science, my achievements, is tinged by implicit bias,” she says. “Get a big grant? Male colleagues think it's because I won the diversity card.”

“Imagine how much energy is wasted on dealing with implicit bias when we could be generating new innovative ideas,” she says.

For Hulshof and so many others like her — people who have dedicated their lives to academic science — this culture of exclusion is not only personally exhausting; it's also detrimental to the progress of scientific research and knowledge as a whole.

Dr. Hulshof says that her time in academia has not been without stress. “There is a big pressure to succeed that's both internal and external,” she says. “In science, there's a big aversion to failure, but I think it's the opposite. It's important to generate lots of ideas that fail so that you can get to the one good idea that you can build out.”

Prof. Hulshof worries that when she fails, her colleagues who have a traditional (ahem, outdated) mindset will attribute her failure to her identity as a brown female. That pressure is also internalized too. “It's sometimes surreal to exist in a space that wasn't created with you in mind and doesn't really support you either.”

Hulshof is not alone, either. According to data released this year, women of color are underrepresented at every level of academia.

Universities have not been designed for women, let alone women of color, according to a paper titled “Why so Few, Still? Challenges to Attracting, Advancing, and Keeping Women Faculty of Color in Academia” by Jean Fox Tree Professor at University of California, Santa Cruz and Jyotsna Vaid Doctorate at Texas A&M University.

For most academics, the job comes with a certain amount of pressure: long hours, tight budgets, and in some cases, the weight of one's institution's reputation on your shoulders.

Hulshof says she feels obligated to recruit and support minority students in STEM careers. But she worries that by doing so, she is setting her students up for failure — or worse yet, making them feel like they aren't good enough to succeed in an industry that is generally unsupportive of their kind.

“Instead of recruiting students,” she says, “maybe I need to be working on challenging the structures of Academia.” She acknowledges that this is too much for any individual to take on — but if there were more people like her working towards the same goal, she believes real change could happen. “I hope I see that in my career.”

Disclosure: Dr Hulshof is my wife.

Catherine M. Hulshof, PhD is an ecologist at Virginia Commonwealth University and Co-founder at Collaboratory.ist

Her research intersects biodiversity science, data science, and climate science. She and her team study how organisms to entire forests respond to climate change. BioDiversityResearchLab.com

Wilson Dávalos-Nieves, Co-founder of Collaboratory.
Collaboratory helps scientists discover and connect to potential collaborators.