Needing to move is a huge barrier to broadening representation in the sciences

Science will be more inclusive and equitable when we stop expecting people to uproot their lives every few years

There are a lot of barriers preventing us from building a scientific workforce that represents the actual composition of this country. Even when try to work on these barriers, the broader scientific community isn’t making much progress.

Worse, there are more barriers that we aren’t even working on. Case in point: I am convinced that one of biggest barriers to genuine diversification is our cultural norm expecting junior scientists to move multiple times throughout their training.

Try to take a step back from your participation in science, and try to think about it this way. We are asking our trainees this question: “What’s more important? This career path, or being near everybody in your life who is important to you?”

Or for some, the question is: “What’s more important? This career path, or not uprooting the lives of your family members on multiple occasions and harm the career prospects of your spouse?”

How junior scientists answer this question will covary with socioeconomic status, first gen status, culture, ethnicity, gender, and many other ways folks end up being minoritized.

No matter how you look at it, this is a crappy situation for our discipline and it’s keeping us from recruiting talented scientists who are smart enough to decide that they deserve better.

A lot of us are charged with the task of recruiting new people into STEM from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, making our field accessible, and providing a sense of belonging. What do we do right after we bring new people into our community? We tell them to pack their bags and so somewhere else. And tell them to not get too comfortable, because they’re going to have to do it at least a couple more times. Are we a profession, or are we a cult?

Even for people who live in huge metropolitan areas, the pathway towards a career in academic science is extremely difficult to pull off without moving. I work with a few people who are from LA and stayed in the LA area for undergrad, grad school, postdoc, and professorhood. But it’s quite rare in the sciences, because there’s this weird bias against people who want to stay at the same institution for their graduate training and postdoc training.

Take, for example, my pathway, which is not atypical. I didn't move very far away to college (I lived in the dorms, and it would have been an extreme break from the social norms at the SLAC I attended to live at home with my parents, and I was glad to leave home anyway.). Five years later, I moved from LA to Colorado go to grad school. Then, I went to Texas for a postdoc. Then I went to Pennsylvania/Maryland for a visiting faculty position. Then I went to San Diego for a tenure-track position. But then to stay on the tenure-track, I had to move and came back home to LA. (And throughout all of this, as a field biologist, I’ve spent plenty of time out of the country for research). It turns out that most of these moves were okay for my partner and many of our choices underlying these moves were made to prioritize her career plans. We were very lucky to have solved the two-body problem — twice! When we returned to Southern California this was about being near family more than anything else. But are we done moving? If I wish to switch into a new leadership position (and I do!), then this will probably involve having to move. Yet again.

My academic journey involving moving for grad school, postdoc, VAP, and two faculty positions. Which isn’t an atypical number of times moving.

I was mostly okay with moving away to grad school in Colorado. But you know what? My priorities and identities as an undergrad and postbac were extremely different than the students who I am serving as a professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills. I did not feel nearly as connected my family as my students are, and I also didn’t have any members of my family who were relying on me for financial support, or parenting, or eldercare. While I had a variety of siblings in the area, to be honest there wasn’t anybody who would be missing me that much on my departure. I guess I came from a cultural background or tradition or whatever you call it, where it’s just fine and normal for me to leave home and most folks would be accepting of that. That said, it was still hard for me to move away because this disrupted a newish relationship that I was in, and where I ended up going was, in part, to accommodate my partner.

I don’t know why it is that I (like many other white and middleish-class academics) have backgrounds and families and social networks that are okay with us cutting roots and replanting every few years, but we do. That’s a question for the sociologists. What I can tell you is that I know that the students that we are desperately trying to recruit into our community have different priorities and community ties than I do, and they have far more compelling reasons to not move.

We need to stop trying to “fix” our students and convince them to move across the country for grad school or a postdoc or a job. We need instead to repair the STEM training network so that we can recruit talent where it is. Have it occurred to you that there are smart and talented people everywhere?

I think a substantial level of resistance to focusing on local recruitment comes from the (likely elitist) notion that universities need to recruit nationally and internationally in order to maintain some level of excellence (whatever that’s supposed to mean). For example, I’m remembering a time last decade when I visited with a bunch of folks at the University of Michigan. I met with some folks from the DEI committee, and individually with folks from various programs. I posed a scenario about equity, identity, and student recruitment, and the responses were very illuminating.

I asked, “Let’s say that your graduate program started recruiting most of its graduate students from within Michigan. Take a look at all of the undergraduate institutions around, and all of the available talent. Don’t you think that the program would still be highly successful, and that labs would land great talent, and that people would thrive?”

I brought this up with a variety of people, because honestly I was generally blown away by the extreme whiteness of the place, and I realized this was a very pragmatic strategy that could really fix the problem. People were asking me how they might get more diversity, and I said, well — you have plenty nearby! You just need to recruit those folks.

And WOW. I only got two kinds of answers, from opposite ends of the spectrum. Some folks were like, “Yes, of course. I see what you’re saying. I’ve got no problem with primarily bringing grad students into my lab who come from neighboring universities, and I’m sure that focusing on our community would make this a better place.” And then there were people who offered a thousand different reasons why it wouldn’t work, but the main concern is that if you want to recruit the best talent, then you’ve got to cast the biggest net. You can’t be a world leader unless you’re drawing from the world, they say.

I think the difference between the two groups might recapitulate the whether or not someone emphasizes graduate training or whether they’re more interested in working with graduate students as a source of labor. Or whether they have enough of a conceit that their extremely narrow research interest can only attract the right students if they are able to recruit from such a broad pool that they’ll find the right magical fit with students. Or maybe they simply want to pluck out the student who has so much experience, they’re out-of-the-box ready to go.

I’ll tell any R1 in a big city in the United States: you want to fix your diversity problem in your graduate programs? Just recruit students from all of the regional public universities in a 200 mile radius of your campus. (And, of course, provide these students with the resources, support, and community they need to succeed.) Could it be that simple?

Meanwhile, I’ve worked with so many students who have extremely good reasons to not apply for graduate programs that are far away. Which means that they might be interested in doctoral programs at UCLA, USC, maybe UC Riverside or UC Irvine, and at a big stretch, maybe UCSD or UCSB. But all of those universities are recruiting students from around the planet, and what are they odds that the stars will align?

This philopatric inclination to want to stay near home makes a lot of sense. It’s cultural, it’s socioeconomic, it’s ethnic. Moreover the intersectionality between gender and ethnicity results in some huge disparities. What people expect for themselves, and what families expect of their children is an issue that we need to understand and to respect. It’s perfectly normal and human to not want to have to move across the country to get trained to be a scientist. Why can’t we accept that this is normal? If we are genuinely committed to the cultural changes that are necessary to create an accessible and equitable community, then doesn’t that mean we need to make room for these social and cultural values that prioritize families and home?

I should also add that there are now substantial parts of this country that are demonstrably less safe for people based on their capacity for getting pregnant, ethnicity, and gender identity. This need being mobile to advance one’s career is a luxury for white guys like me who aren’t experiencing these risks. This is yet another reason why we need to make sure to build a scientific community that prioritizes local recruitment to emphasize those who need to stay at home with their network of support.