This article by Amy Harmon for the New York Times provides insight from a Black mathematician, Edray Goins, about what it’s like to be part of a discipline’s 1% and part of academia’s “leaky pipeline,” so-named for universities’ dismal record in retaining scientists of color and women scientists.
Dr. Goin’s experiences help in understanding what it would be like for ANYA’s “Dr. Seymour Livingston” who would be quite unusual as a thirty-something Black geneticist. As part of our research and outreach for ANYA we’ve attended a number of genetics meetings with 50-2000 attendees. So far we’ve met only one Black geneticist and he was not from the U.S. We’ll have to dig more to find the national numbers for genetics, but according to the NSF, African American men made up only 2.9% of all doctoral recipients in 2017.
Real life mathematician, Dr. Edray Goins. Read more.
Photo by: Jared Soares for The New York Times.
ANYA’s fictional geneticist, Dr. Seymour Livingston, played by Motell Foster.
Photo by Jacob Okada.