A week ago Keith Kloor had a post up, What Science, Environmentalism and the GOP Have in Common, where he bemoaned the lack of representation of non-whites in these categories. As a matter of fact I think Keith is wrong about science. Even constraining the data set to American citizens and permanent residents people of Asian ancestry are well represented in many areas of science. But not all sciences are created equal. In 2011 there were 158 doctorates which were awarded within the category of 'evolutionary biology' for American citizens or permanent residents. Of these 135 were non-Hispanic white, and 5 were Asian. In 'neuroscience' the respective figures were 742, 535, and 96. In 'zoology' 55, 49, and 0. In 'bioinformatics' they were 80, 51, and 17. Finally, in 'ecology' the breakdown was 330, 300, and 11. If you are involved in academic biology I'm rather sure that these numbers won't surprise you too much, even if you'd never thought about it. You can even infer these by walking through the posters at ASHG 2012, and seeing how the demographics of the crowds shift. We can look at this issue another way. In 2010 US News & World Report listed the top 10 ecology & evolution graduate programs. I went to the faculty websites after typing the university and 'ecology,' and then 'neuroscience.' Looking at names, and sometimes head shots, I classified everyone as 'Asian' (as defined by the US Census) and 'Not Asian.' You can find the data here. Please note that the left columns are ecology faculty, and the right are neuroscience. The raw results are:
And here are charts of % and counts:
University & DepartmentAsianNot Asian% Asian
Berkeley - Ecology0460.0%
