A first-of-its-kind digital tool focused on Black women and data on their contributions to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) field is coming to Spelman College.
The tool, made possible by a generous donation from Google.com, began with a conversation held by the Spelman’s Center of Excellence leadership advisory board over two years ago. When researchers realized the lack of data while attempting to champion the contributions of Black women across various STEM fields, they took matters into their own hands, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
It wasn’t long before the board’s proposal for the Spelman College Virtual Hub caught the attention of Google.com. The multinational technology company presented the college with a grant for $5 million in 2022, the HBCU’s
largest single grant in the school’s history, to help Spelman’s Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM bring the digital tool to life. The goal is to use the platform to not only champion Black women in STEM but also provide in-depth data about their achievements.“I think the vastness of who we are is not well understood because the data is not in one central location,” said Spelman Vice Provost for Research Tasha Inniss. She also notes that although the project is “ambitious,” it will benefit “so many people” in the long run.
Although it’s currently in the prototype stage, the hub will feature comprehensive data about Black women in STEM. The information will be readily accessible to students, researchers,
and policymakers, and the average internet user can access the Spelman College Virtual Hub. Additionally, the dashboard will directly link users to stories about women within the field, provide resources to locate research and funding opportunities, and help them access research articles specifically created for and written by Black women.To bring the project to fruition, the advisory board enlisted a 12-person team of engineers, product managers, user experience researchers, and designers from Google.com to create the dashboard. The group, which all worked on the project completely free of charge, worked together to get the idea off the ground. Once the fellowship was over, Spelman hired a software engineer and user experience designer to bring the project full circle with more additions and features.
The school will also hire professional services organizations to “integrate specialized technical aspects” into the hub’s dashboard.
“Not to sound cliche, but I think the potential is endless,” said Celeste Lee, an assistant professor of sociology at Spelman. She also shared the dashboard’s key responsibility: to “shift the narrative” and alter misconceptions about Black women in STEM.
While the dashboard currently focuses on Black women, Spelman will scale the program to include data on Latina and Indigenous women in STEM in the future. Users can now select a prewritten question from a drop-down list through the software to access “quantitative and qualitative data in a simple, accessible format.”
More functions will eventually be added to the Spelman College Virtual Hub, which includes,
but isn’t limited to, artificial intelligence-powered tools that can “automate relevant and recent information about the statistics of Black women in the STEM workforce, populating material from the school’s archives or creating and updating lists of conferences and networking events, among other features.”Led by the Spelman Center of Excellence for Minority Women in STEM, the dashboard prototype’s beta version is currently only available to students, faculty, and other researchers for feedback before being deployed to the masses.
RELATED CONTENT: North Carolina A&T’s Endowment Hits $200 Million