2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this WIP research paper is to explore intersectional outcomes of disabled women in the STEM workforce. Our research will focus on how analyzing marginalized identities in isolation may erase effects at their intersections. This approach will serve to better represent individuals with multiple underrepresented identities. In this paper, we examine the effect disability status, race, and sex has on salary in STEM fields. In order to attend to these intersectional identities in our analysis, we will utilize tenants from both the critical quantitative methodology (QuantCrit) and the disability critical race theory framework (DisCrit). This analysis will use data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) Diversity and STEM: Women, Minorities, and People with Disabilities biennial report to parse the methods of categorizing and analyzing disabled women within the STEM workforce. Using baseline data provided by NCSES, we will compare salaries across intersectional groupings (i.e., disabled Black women, nondisabled Hispanic men). Reframing this data will shed light on if treating marginalized identities as separate, as how is done in the NSF NCSES Diversity and STEM report, does a disservice to exploring the experiences of disabled women in STEM. Quantitative methods such as chi-square analysis will be used to integrate and combine the race, sex, and disability data and compare those results to the overall averages amongst each population. This article will analyze if the separation of race, sex, and disability in this report is suppressing or erasing the negative implications for these marginalized groups in STEM.