Executive Summary

Academic educators have invested thousands of hours in outreach to diversify the STEM pipeline, yet we have barely moved the needle and may even have regressed. The evidence suggests our educational systems are failing at the highest academic levels. For example, while 45% of biomedicine and engineering undergraduates are women, only 22% of faculty and 12% of Department Chairs in these fields are women. In particular, Black women face the vicious "double-bind" of gender and race in STEM, comprising less than one percent of biomedicine and engineering faculty. Our coalition of approximately 230 women faculty in biomedicine and engineering believes that, in order to achieve equity in STEM, we must first dismantle the barriers facing Black women faculty in our field. The most devastating of these barriers is the disparity in grant reviews and funding. We propose a Pivotal Ventures Research Awards program to solve intersectional gender and racial funding disparities in STEM, which will catapult nationwide Black Women Faculty to the highest levels of influence in biomedicine and engineering.

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