The sense that we're invisible: A longitudinal analysis of diverse women's experiences with structural violence in biomedical doctoral programs

A longstanding and significant disparity in representation across gender, economic status, ethnicity, race, and sexual identity exists within STEM doctoral training. Most of the research on the retention and attrition of minoritized PhD STEM students focuses on individual factors, rather than system level issues. To address these gaps, we qualitatively examined longitudinal experiences of 33 Asian American, Black, and Latiné female biomedical PhD students, using a structural violence framework. The researchers developed three themes: (1) institutional hostility toward core aspects of identity; (2) the importance of intersectionality and within-group variation in experiences with structural violence; and (3) students' growing awareness of structural violence in training. Findings have significant implications for the structure of doctoral training and interventions to create equitable training environments.