Toward an Equity Agenda for Black Girls and Women in STEM Learning Spaces and Careers: Noticing, Validating, and Humanizing

Abstract

This editorial and themed issue is a call to redirect our efforts from teaching Black women and girls how to navigate and persist in toxic STEM learning environments to a greater vision of being and becoming. As we consider what becoming means for Black girls who transition into Black women in STEM learning spaces and careers, there is often an untold story of struggle, resistance, and resilience. I present the experiences of three Black women physicists who in very recent years became the first, while contributors in this issue share cutting-edge scholarship on how Black girls engage in youth participatory action research, the role of race and gender discrimination on Black girls’ mathematical attitudes and beliefs, and how Black girls develop scientific literacies in elementary classrooms. Additional research explores how Black women experience imposter syndrome in their pursuit of terminal STEM degrees, while the final piece in this issue shares counternarratives of Black women engineering teachers by drawing attention to aspirational capital and communal support. We elevate the voices of Black women and girls to author their own stories as unsung heroes in this body of work and reposition them as experts of their experiences. This courageous and radical shift requires coconspirators and agitators to move the equity agenda forward so that Black girls and women are not burdened with the labor of undoing, disrupting, and dismantling systems of oppression that they did not create.