Trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons are—and have always been—an integral part of humankind. However, these communities are under attack. We live in a time of growing state repression and the normalization of political violence against trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons throughout much of the world, and we have a responsibility to understand these conditions and consider their implications for science education. In this commentary, we briefly outline the growing state repression of trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons, illustrating this repression with examples primarily drawn from the U.S. context, while acknowledging similar forms of repression happening in many countries. We discuss the ways that scientific discourses and ideologies are being co-opted to rationalize these attacks, explain the responsibility this creates for science educators, and examine the important work that has already been done to understand and dismantle oppression and to celebrate the lives and accomplishments of these communities within and beyond science education. Finally, we offer recommendations for specific actions that science educators and researchers can take to uphold the human rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex persons and communities.

This paper examines an emerging and fast-growing category of science teachers: non-tenure track, teaching-intensive, full-time chemistry faculty. Although women remain underrepresented as STEM faculty overall, they are overrepresented in teaching-intensive positions. This disproportionality invokes a concern for equity. Guided by theories of intersectionality to purposely recruit interviewees, this qualitative study asked: what is the experience of non-tenure track faculty in science? How do their experiences vary across type of institution and race/ethnicity, as well as across gender identity? Findings were based upon grounded theory analysis of 19 interviews with 14 women and 5 men working in chemistry departments at universities around the United States. Gendered chutes and ladders are evident across the respondents; men were elevated while their female peers were marginalized. Moreover, as whiteness confers belonging in STEM, white men describe themselves as ‘just dads’ or ‘natural teachers’, whereas women’s childcare duties or preference for teaching are something that needs to be overcome. In particular, for women of color and women who immigrated to the United States, discrimination and harassment contribute to pernicious gender inequity in this occupation.

Seeking to make high school physics more accessible and equitable, a narrative-supported inquiry curriculum set on Mars was designed. Video and audio data from the curriculum’s implementation was collected. Using sociocultural learning theory and intersectionality theory, the data was analyzed through systematic comparison across cases of diverse student group interactions. Results show inquiry learning with a narrative scenario can include and empower diverse gender, racial and language identities. It can also, however, work to disempower and exclude when dominant students take up the narrative of their hegemonically white culture. This leads to the conclusion that if authentic physics learning is untethered from a critical stance on social problems, students may reproduce these problems as much as they also may challenge them.

Neoliberal academia is marked by vertical and horizontal gender segregation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) is a particularly concerning case. Women with PhDs are underrepresented, and when they do participate, they are more likely than men to be in teaching-intensive roles. Beyond equality concerns, this is problematic because when women are interpreters rather than producers of disciplinary knowledge, the STEM enterprise remains gender-biased. Using data from a 2-year ethnography with physical science faculty in teaching-intensive roles, this paper argues that gender inequity is reproduced through postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. Participants who are mothers say they are flying under the radar at work. They self-surveille as they engage in both paid labor as university educators and unpaid carework at home. Importantly, when participants challenge hegemonic gender norms, they attract the radar's attention and are sanctioned. This study contributes to a growing understanding of how and why women are marginalized in STEM careers. Women with science PhDs fulfill their university's teaching mission with minimal support for the implied compensation of work-life balance, leaving the institutional structures which privilege men's participation in STEM research intact.

Seeking to make upper secondary school physics more relevant and engaging, an online collaborative learning curriculum was designed. Each of the curriculum's lessons was structured as a goal-based scenario about human scientists on Mars. Video and audio data from the curriculum's implementation in Denmark was collected. This study utilized the theoretical lenses intersectionality, repertoires of practice, and epistemic agency. The use of comics as an analytical tool provided a novel and accessible way to depict the complex dynamics within the physics classroom. It allowed for a multimodal representation of the data and enabled a nuanced examination of the students' interactions. Findings suggest that interactions were shaped by the students' identities and these dynamics shaped their repertoires of practice. Moreover, the interactions had a profound impact on students' epistemic agency in physics. Collaborative learning with a goal-based scenario can include and empower diverse gender, racial, and language identities. It can also, however, work to disempower and exclude when the hegemonically white and masculine culture of physics is left unproblematized. This leads to the conclusion that if reform-based science education is untethered from a critical stance on socioscientific issues, students and teachers may reproduce social problems as much as they also may challenge them.

This article reports on how gender shapes the work of university science faculty. Theories of gender as a social system are used to disentangle how individuals, social interactions, and institutions (re)produce inequality by sustaining occupational gender segregation in higher education science. The study uses qualitative data from an ethnography of six teaching faculty at a large research-intensive public university in the United States. These teaching faculty, largely women in a department in which the majority are men, are ineligible for tenure and institutionally positioned as having lower status. The disadvantages are experienced in different ways across all the women on the teaching faculty. In contrast, men on the teaching faculty are recognizable as scientists and are by default treated with respect. As such, they are elevated regardless of their skill as teachers. This study offers a theoretical contribution to the current understanding of gendered occupations by suggesting that the experiences of the science teaching faculty can be conceptualized as chutes and ladders. Ladders are mechanisms reserved for the elevation of men. Chutes are reserved for women because regardless of how women approach their work, the gender system is constructed to hold them back.

This study utilizes interviews with 33 racially diverse high school girls who have expressed interest in engineering careers. Using the framework of critical consciousness and informed by intersectional theories, the authors examine their views about gender inequality in engineering. Results revealed that while most articulated systemic understandings of inequality, Black participants were particularly likely to exhibit this critical reflection. Yet many young women revealed a more emerging form of critical reflection, particularly Asian participants. Few respondents expressed critical self-efficacy, or confidence to challenge gender inequality in their future careers; such views were almost exclusively held by Black and Latinx respondents. In contrast, White respondents commonly invoked a "lean-in" self-efficacy to be successful navigating, but not challenging, the White male-dominated engineering workforce. Overall, we find clear evidence that young women's racialized identities have implications not only for their understandings of gender inequality, but also for their motivation to disrupt it.

This inquiry into the nature of feminist solidarity in the academic sciences is guided by the intra-activity of gendered bodies in teaching-intensive faculty positions. It uses diffractive methodology to examine how response-able research practice can account for enactment of social discourse through agential cuts. Over the course of a two-year ethnography in a university with high research activity, gender performativity in the contested space of feminized teaching and masculine science was analysed. This article aims to make visible how researcher subjectivities entangle with data collection. Results show how specific agential cuts – alpha female, silencing, less-than-person, squashing passion, and staying to get tenure – illuminate a unique diffractive pattern. The pattern troubles structural notions of feminist solidarity, as ethnographic participants marginalized by institutional hierarchies survive by queering it. Furthermore, the inquiry gestures towards a humble, local, and tentative contribution to post-human theorizing on ‘queering the glass ceiling’.

Increasingly in higher education, teaching undergraduate physical science is the job of non-tenure track faculty (NTTF). Because physical science is normatively masculine while teaching is normatively feminine (Keller, 1985; Williams, 1995), both male and female NTTF experience contradictory gender tensions. This inquiry explores a contradiction: how can feminist solidarity help women in science advance, if the institution negates their full and equal inclusion? They are not faculty, they are non. To make sense of these contradictions and answer new questions, I turned to queer theory, which makes a pointed critique of binaries. Reading the data against theory with a diffractive analysis, I find that working within the system to counter sexism is close to futile because those in power use diminishment to divide and conquer.