Valuing Identity in the Classroom: What Economics Can Learn from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education

In recent decades, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics have worked with some success to increase the participation of groups historically underrepresented in these fields. For example, as shown in Figure 1, from 1996 to 2022, women, people of underrepresented racial minority groups of all genders, and women from racial minority groups saw increased attainment of undergraduate degrees in these fields, although they still lag behind the population of those groups attaining social science degrees and their representation in the general population (for example, in the 2020 Census, women made up 50.9 percent, and racial minorities 32.2 percent, of the US population).1 This increased attainment is due in part