There’s an opportunity to step up the inclusion of Black talent in STEM fields, write senior partner Mark McMillan, partner Jan Shelly Brown, and colleagues. According to a Pew Research survey, the percentage of Black adults who say “Black people have reached the highest levels of success” in a range of careers was highest for professional athletes and musicians—and approximately double the rate of engineers and scientists.
Image description:
A bar chart contains 9 stacked bars, each representing a split yes or no answer regarding how polled US Black adults feel about whether Black people have reached the highest levels of success within 9 different professional groups. They are ordered from highest agreement at the left to lowest agreement at right. Of those surveyed, 84% believe that Black people have attained high levels of achievement as professional athletes, 80% feel the same for professional musicians, 60% for lawyers, 58% for clergy, 55% for medical doctors, 54% for military officers, 52% for business executives, 43% for engineers, and 36% for scientists. The negative values are displayed as being below the yes values as a horizon, so that the visual slopes from left to right.
Footnote 1: Respondents who did not give an answer are not shown.
Source: Cary Funk, Black Americans’ views of and engagement with science, Pew Research Center, Apr 7, 2022
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To read the article, see “How to close the Black tech talent gap,” February 3, 2023.