What’s your definition of diversity?
The 30 members named yesterday to an enlarged President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) constitute the “most diverse” roster in the panel’s history, according to a White House press release. The statement says the demographic mix of presidential appointees, which includes an equal number of men and women, “will help the council bring to bear a wide range of perspectives to address the nation’s most pressing opportunities and challenges.”
The press release emphasizes two categories traditionally used to measure diversity in science—gender and race. “For the first time, women make up half of PCAST,” it says, adding that Maria Zuber and Frances Arnold, two of the three previously announced co-chairs, are the first women to head the group since its inception in 1957. It also notes that “people of color and immigrants make up more than one-third of PCAST.” By delving into their bios, ScienceInsider came up with a more precise tally of 12 members who fit one or more of those categories: four Black people, two Latinos, and three Asian Americans, as well as individuals born in Australia, Argentina, and Iran.
However, gender and race/ethnicity aren’t the only way to measure diversity. For example, the press release is silent on whether anyone identifies as LGBTQ. Highlighting the value of diversity also raises the broader question of what metrics to use in assessing diversity.
“To deal with what the country is facing, you want to have a mixture of people with deep expertise in one area but also experience and interest in a lot of other areas,” says Shirley Malcom, who leads SEA Change, an initiative at AAAS (publisher of ScienceInsider) to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in U.S. higher education. “And I think this is a really interesting group of people.”
To that end, here are some other categories that diversity experts say might bear on the council’s ability to present President Joe Biden with a wide range of perspectives.
- Twenty of the 30 members belong to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a body created in 1862 to advise the U.S. government. Its self-selected membership is supposed to represent the highest level of scientific achievement, although some have criticized it for a lack of diversity.
- Of the 18 members from academia, 11 are faculty members at the nation’s elite private institutions—think Stanford University, Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, and the California and Massachusetts institutes of technology. Seven are from public state universities, including the University of California system; the University of Texas, Austin; Iowa State University; Florida State University; and the Texas A&M University system. One is chancellor of the New Mexico State University system, whose five campuses are classified as minority-serving institutions.
- Of the six members who are top corporate executives, four come from the Big Tech sector—Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Advanced Micro Devices. A fifth is head of Masimo, a small medical technology company, and the sixth is chief technology officer at 3M.
- Four members have led U.S. government agencies, including physicist and former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and business entrepreneur and former Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, both under former President Barack Obama.
- Only two PCAST members work in the social and behavioral sciences—Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale, and Jonathan Levin, a Stanford economist. A third member, Cathy Woteki, is an agricultural and food scientist. By the White House’s count, seven members are computer scientists, five others are engineers, and five work in the biological and life sciences, including three with medical degrees. Three are physicists, a discipline traditionally overrepresented on PCAST.
- At least four members are in their 40s, including recipients of such prestigious awards for early-career scientists as the Fields Medal and the Alan T. Waterman Award.
The 30-member PCAST is almost double the size it was under former President Donald Trump, whose administration took nearly 3 years to stand up the science advisory body. Its first meeting has not yet been scheduled, according to a spokesperson for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which manages the council.