The first thing an economist looks for in this kind of situation is earnings differences. I’ll concentrate on black and Hispanic faculty while leaving gender for another day. The simple point: When compared to nonminority faculty, STEM-trained minority Ph.D.s have a greater financial incentive to seek employment in industry rather than in the academy than do non-STEM minority faculty.

Are pecuniary considerations the only thing holding down the number of minority college faculty in STEM? Almost certainly not. But is $13,000 enough to be an important piece of the explanation? Almost certainly.

I’ve taken data from the American Community Survey from 2009 through 2015 and have pulled out the observations for the 130,000 Ph.D. recipients who are observed to be working, and who are over 25 and under 66 years old. Ph.D. recipients are defined as having a STEM background if their bachelor’s degree was in STEM—that being what the data reports. Finally, I’ve defined “minority” as black or Hispanic. That’s not quite right, but should be pretty close in the context of looking at underrepresented minorities in higher education.

Read the full article on minority representation in STEM by Dick Startz at Brookings