African Americans in evolutionary science: where we have been, and what’s next

Abstract

In 2017 National Science Foundation data revealed that in the United States the professional biological workforce was composed of ~ 69.5% “whites”, 21.3% “Asians”, and only 3% “African American or Blacks” (National Science Foundation, 2017, https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/doctoratework/2017/html/sdr2017_dst_03.html). There are problems with the categories themselves but without too deep an investigation of these, these percentages are representative of the demography of biology as a whole over the latter portion of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. However, evolutionary biologists would argue (and correctly so) that the representation of persons of African descent in our field is probably an order of magnitude lower (0.3%). This commentary focuses on the factors that are associated with underrepresentation of African Americans in evolutionary science careers.