These two Philly-area nurses are on a mission to get nursing recognized as a STEM field

Two nursing professors from the Philadelphia area are leading a national coalition seeking to convince federal agencies to recognize their field as a science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, profession.

Nurses currently lack such recognition from most government agencies, which prevents them from accessing millions of dollars in grants for STEM-specific research and other opportunities like the White House’s $1.2 billion investment in STEM in 2022.

Marion Leary and Rebecca Love, who cochair the Nursing is STEM Coalition, will submit a petition letter at the end of April asking the Department of Homeland Security to designate nursing a STEM profession.

DHS is the first target of their campaign for universal recognition among federal agencies. Currently, only some agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, recognize nursing as STEM.

The Inquirer spoke with Love, from Villanova University, and Leary, from the University of Pennsylvania, about why the STEM designation matters to nurses.

STEM professions have benefited from priority status by funders and government agencies over the past decade. For example, DHS allows foreign students to stay longer in the U.S. after graduation if they obtained a STEM degree. And the National Science Foundation sets aside millions of dollar in grants every year for STEM professionals.

There has also been an emphasis by government, universities, and private employers on creating pipelines for women and people from underrepresented communities into STEM fields.

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“STEM is basically building the careers of the future,” said Love, a visiting nursing professor at Villanova, who also runs a nonprofit focused on ways to bill and reimburse for the care nurses provide.

The Department of Homeland Security has recognized a growing list of STEM professions over the years. These include social psychology and global health, for example, outside of the traditional bench science and engineering jobs.

Nurses apply science, technology, math, and engineering in their daily work, said Leary, the director of innovation at Penn Nursing. Nurses learn pharmacology, manage medications, and operate technology at the bedsides of patients every day.

“All the work that nurses do, both clinically and outside the bedside, that’s all science, technology, engineering and math,” Leary said.

Leary and Love heard stories from nurses who had to return grants, or lost fellowship opportunities, because their degrees aren’t considered STEM. The impacts extend to nurses with doctorate degrees like Leary, whose research is based in statistics.

Leary believes gender bias is a factor. She said the fact that about 90% of nurses are women could contribute to the decision to overlook nursing as a STEM field.

“It’s a female-dominated profession living in a world of STEM that is majority male,” she said.

The national coalition that Leary and Love cochair is about two months old.

They view their application for STEM recognition by DHS as a bellwether, having noticed that other agencies followed when DHS previously designated a profession as STEM.

The application is due at the end of April, and DHS is expected to announce a decision in August. More than 100 nursing organizations and leaders in the field signed onto the letter, they said.

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Love hopes the STEM designation can help with funding to sustain the profession after many nurses left bedside care positions after the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, and hospitals are struggling with a nursing shortage.

“There’s no greater profession in the United States, in my opinion, that uses a combination of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to advance forward human health than nursing,” she said. “It is time that we correctly be classified as such.”