Black people still few and far between in biotech industry
SAN DIEGO — San Diego biotechs are working to erase cancer, light up nerves during surgery and scan thousands of molecules with artificial intelligence.
The industry’s workforce, however, is less futuristic than its goals.
Black people account for 6% of the county’s overall workforce but just 3% of biotech, according to the San Diego Workforce Partnership. Hispanics or Latinos, who represent a third of the county’s workforce, make up 16% of biotech.
To understand the dearth of diversity, we reached out to past and present biotech employees, recruiters, and the county’s research institutes, universities and colleges.
People highlighted several issues, including limited diversity in academic pipelines that feed into biotech, companies recruiting within their own network bubbles, and explicit and implicit bias in reviewing applications.
And getting hired is just the beginning. Black people within the industry said they had to work even harder to get noticed and rewarded for taking on challenging projects that would allow them to climb the corporate ladder. That may explain why minorities are especially scarce at the highest rungs of biotech.
None of these issues are new; biotech’s lack of diversity has been documented for more than 20 years. But the topic has taken on new urgency lately.
“I think this is a good opportunity now, with George Floyd, where we can all go back and really reflect and find ways out of systemic racism,” said Paul Mola, one of San Diego’s few Black biotech CEOs. “And, by God, what many don’t understand is that we all get better. The society gets stronger. The country gets stronger.” Early challenges The average San Diego biotech CEO is 56 years old, according to a 2015 report by Liftstream, a U.K. life science executive search firm. But the barriers that keep Black people out of biotech start far earlier in life.
A Union-Tribune investigation showed that Black and Latino public school students seldom have teachers who look like them. That holds true throughout higher education, according to the National Center for
Education Statistics.
“I’m happy to mentor students from underprivileged backgrounds,” said Guy Salvesen, dean of Sanford Burnham Prebys’s graduate program. “But I’m an old White guy
“I might say the right things, and I try to act on the right things, but I’m not the right kind of mentor. I don’t have the same background.”
Having mentors and role models who look like you matters, says Jervaughn Hunter, a Black bioengineering graduate student at UC San Diego who is working on new, minimally invasive ways to treat heart disease.
It’s a project that’s hard to explain to family back in his hometown of Port Gibson, Mississippi, home to less than 2,000 people. Growing up, Hunter didn’t know anyone in biotech — or that such careers existed.
“There’s no one there to actually exemplify what that career is, so no one thinks to go into it,” Hunter said.
That creates a sort of self-fulfilling cycle, he says. You don’t see yourself represented in a career, so you don’t pursue it. And because you don’t pursue it, you’re not represented.