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University-industry partnerships (UIPs) in STEM expand opportunities for students and incorporate industry experiences into the academic enterprise. While UIPs have increased, few studies explore marginalized students’ experiences within industry settings. Our study addresses this literature gap with an emphasis on Black women in computing from HBCUs. We utilized the Role Strain and Adaptation Model for Black Women’s STEM Success and phenomenological approaches to explore challenges that many Black women encounter in UIPs—specifically structural inequities at the intersection of race and gender; macroaggressions and imposter syndrome. Implications for practice, research, and policy are discussed while noting increasingly complicated climates for diversity efforts. 

Given a need for scale development concerning the intersectional experiences of Black women in computing, this preliminary study seeks to design such a measure while focusing on intersectionality within three domains—structural, political, and representational. 

This chapter focuses on the experiences of Black undergraduate women, with an emphasis on factors that hinder and help to promote their successful progression to STEM degrees. In doing so, the chapter explores existing research concerning how their experiences may be shaped by their gender and race, as well as the combination thereof. The chapter begins with some important contextual information to frame the discussion of literature that follows. This entails defining STEM as a concept, as well as a discussion of the national STEM policy agenda. The second section of the chapter provides a thematic review of current higher education literature concerning Black women’s experiences in STEM, detailing frameworks that are common in the literature and covering issues such as the complexities of race-gendered stereotypes in STEM, along with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Black women’s STEM experiences. The third section of the chapter proposes a conceptual framework that combines the literature concerning Black women’s challenges pursuing STEM degrees and their sources of support to better understand how both can ultimately impact their STEM success. The chapter closes by highlighting important limitations in existing research and offering suggestions for future work.