An article posted by the Chronicle explained how consistently women and underrepresented minorities are not choosing to pursue the faculty route after receiving their Ph.D with about 43% less likely for underrepresented males and 54% underrepresented minority females.
The article only points to a hidden "something is going on" systematically for students not to pursue a Ph.D. route and cited a few examples of people wanting to pursue mentorship programs and other avenues instead of pursuing faculty positions. The article overall points to a gap in graduate school experiences as a reason for them not pursuing the faculty route and believed that the faculty route is about how comfortable peers feel about you and that discrimination will be highly involved.
My thoughts on this is that discrimination and how people talk to you influences your outlook at the future highly all throughout your professional career. I thought of our own Dean of Students "Dean Ballom" has only a master's degree instead of a Ph.D. I then asked myself have I ever seen/will I ever meet a Dean of Student's that is an asian male like myself with only a Master's degree and I have many doubts of discriminatory practices that would or would not allow me to pursue such positions with my degree. A belief in a unspoken ceiling of social/economic mobility. It is no different from academia either if the committee of people that are involved are not comfortable with your ideas or underrepresented, I have yet to meet many asian male student affairs professionals that are faculty positions not in stereotypical positions of faculty in engineering, business, student affairs positions in international student services, and cultural houses. I know some always exist as I see flyers of people but none that I myself interact with in my own world of student affairs on a daily basis. I often just hear that they don't pursue education instead as a major, but then thought of how asians are treated in education fields and then I wondered if anything will change in the future. I often feel like a silent voice among many, alway advocating, constantly having to explain myself why passive discrimination influences even our smallest recruitment efforts at the university and influences the entire asian community in general. When I attended ACPA last year, the number of the asian community of professionals were few claiming most go to NASPA but the discussions were a lot about the national discriminatory practices against asian people. I was surprised. It is as if people have to advocate for themselves by allying themselves with people who are racially like them to survive. I realized I am also deterred from pursuing academia as well because of the low number of people already involved and financial instability that I am not wanting to pursue on my own. It feels often like an uphill battle that is already hard enough with the number of years to pursue a Ph.D especially with a ceiling/quota/oppression of dominance that makes me never want to pursue academia. But maybe someday so that I may hope to further my education and help change the current reality of many professionals.
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Just-Filling-the-Pipeline/190253/?key=SD0gcw5uZnQWMXhnYDYUMzhSPHY%2BYxkhYyBPPS9wbl1WEQ%3D%3D==
I wonder when it comes to these concerns of gender gaps if bringing these issues to light and creating outreach programs are the answer. In general, I think this sort of issues are approached from a surface aspect and we need to address these matters with more an in depth change that interrupts a system that has been placed for centuries.
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