8 Women with Disabilities in STEM

Being a person with a disability is a complex identity that is welded to concepts that are central to this book—opportunity, bias, and systemic disadvantage. The significance of the category is matched by its complexity: to ask what the term disability means is to invoke (intertwined) political, economic, legal, medical, and social factors whose richness and dimensionality far exceed what this case study can summarize. The literature on the history of disability in the US reveals not only entrenched ableism but also the extent to which the idea of disability has transformed over the last century (Albrecht, Seelman, and Bury 2003; Francis and Silvers 2016; Grue 2016; Stiker [1999] 2019). And like many social-identity categories, disability cuts both ways: it is a social project that is always under construction and is also increasingly understood as an identity group and a focal point for building communities, seeking rights and protections, and promoting positive social change.