What does equity look like? Would you recognize its absence in your classroom or your business? Are you willing to address your assumptions and opinions—especially the ones you don’t realize you hold? Are you ready to separate bias from truth? Do you involve the people you serve in your decision making? Do you think in terms of disadvantages or competencies?

Decision-makers in education and business frequently establish policies and allocate resources with the goal of creating equity in the classroom and workplace. Yet many of these well-intentioned policies do not yield the desired result. For instance, while middle school girls score the same as or higher than boys on math and science assessments, and women make up more than 50 percent of college graduates in STEM, the science and engineering workforce is overwhelmingly male. In the STEM fields, who you know or how you look is still often a deciding factor for employment or advancement. How much of this is due to conscious and unconscious biases? How do the implicit and explicit attitudes and behaviors of role models and decision-makers impact students and job-seekers?

This Symposium will be a powerful discussion that examines what equity—and the lack of equity—looks like in STEM education and in the STEM workforce and why inequity still exists. 

Click here to register. The event also includes STEM educator awards and a reception.