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Computer science has a racism problem: these researchers want to fix it

Black and Hispanic people face huge hurdles at technology companies and in computer-science education in the United States, with far-reaching consequences for science and all of society.
  1. Melba Newsome

    1. Melba Newsome is a freelance journalist in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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Juan Gilbert felt alone as he pursued a PhD in computer science in the 1990s. It was a familiar sense that had followed him throughout his university years, as a student from modest means and the first of his family to pursue higher education.

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Nature 610, 440-443 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03251-0

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 23 October 2022: An earlier version of this Feature misstated the rankings of HBCUs and by UMBC. The numbers referred not to doctoral degrees, but to undergraduate students who went to earn doctorates.

References

  1. McKinsey. Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters (McKinsey, 2020).

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  2. Goins, R. et al. State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem (Kapor Center/NAACP, 2022).

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  3. Riegle-Crumb, C., King, B. & Irizarry, Y. Educ. Res. 48, 133–144 (2019).

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  4. Waisome, J. A. M., Jackson, J. F. L. & Gilbert, J. E. in 2020 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology 1–4 (2020).

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