Our Mission
The Women+ of Color Project (W+OCP) was born out of the need to see more Black, Native/Indigenous, Latina/x women+ in academia -- especially in STEM fields like math, physics, materials science, planetary science, and others.
To date, fewer than 100 Black women have received PhD's in Physics compared to 22,000 white men. The W+OCP hopes to address this issue by providing an open platform for W+OC to communicate about best practices for applying to graduate school, surviving graduate school, maintaining research productivity, and growing their academic careers. We also want to provide an online classroom focused on graduate school applications in hopes of providing resources to W+OC who may not have access to this information due to closed-off networks and isolation of institutional knowledge.
We hope that this effort will begin to change the graduate applicant pool across the United States, thus changing the graduate student population, increasing the number of W+OC PhD's, and ultimately increasing the number of W+OC who pursue academic careers, changing the face of academia across the world.
Although we are starting with our focus in STEM fields, we hope that students in other areas will benefit from our resources as well. As we build our network, we hope to provide a wider range of knowledge and experiences that will assist our sisters on their journey.