While conversing with lab members recently, I brought up the jovial cable guy I met while he was installing our apartment’s Internet. He was a younger man with a GED, making twice my salary and working fewer hours to boot. He was excited to have a house and a child on the way, too. Though I love my work, I was a bit envious of his ability to start a family so early in his career. As I relayed this, one colleague noted that I needed to check my privilege: “Science is a privileged career, and only people who can afford to be in it are in it.”

I have heard this sentiment expressed before by the university, my department and professors. They suggest that because only the wealthy are interested in science, it’s OK to not pay undergraduates for the work they do in lab, and it’s OK to not pay graduate students or postdoctoral fellows a living wage. “They can afford it,” they say. This reasoning is circular — of course only the wealthy would be able to afford a job that does not pay. Thus this very attitude that science is a privileged career is part of what keeps lower-income and underrepresented groups out of science in the first place.

I would not have been able to make those first steps toward a career in science if I had not been able to find a paid position as an undergraduate. In college, my loans and scholarships were entirely used up on tuition and fees, and I had to work to pay rent and bills (a more common situation for undergraduates than those on top seem to realize). If I had been expected to start out as an unpaid intern for the first couple of years instead, like we expect undergrads (and now postbaccalaureates!) to do here at UC Berkeley, I would have had to drop out of science in order to survive.

The toxic attitude that science is a “privileged career” is why our postdoctoral union had to fight for National Institutes of Health standard wages this year and why our departments and professors are so reluctant to increase graduate stipends. When I discuss wages, my concerns are dismissed. I’m asked, “Why don’t your parents just help out while you’re in school?,” or I am told to “just stop buying manicures” (I have never gotten a manicure in my life). For many of us, our parents are either incapable of contributing or unwilling to contribute financially. Sometimes they even need help from us, their adult children, as they deal with health problems and aging.

Especially as departments and professors seek out older and more experienced graduates for their doctoral programs, it does not make sense for us — adults in our late 20s or 30s with bachelor’s degrees and years of research experience — to be making less than a living wage. It’s true that we are still learning and that the work we do is part of our education, but the laboratory research performed by graduate students is nothing like work done for a class. It’s a full-time job that produces real product — data — that is used in grants and publications. Besides, the education of a scientist is too long (depending on the discipline, four years for a bachelor’s degree, three years for a master’s degree, five to 10 years of graduate school and four to six years of postdoctoral training) for us to look at this time as merely transitional. We still need to pay our rents and live our lives, and we are, after all, producing product (data) that fuels the big research grants our institution depends on.

To bring underrepresented groups into science, administrators and professors tout the use of outreach. It makes sense that they would prefer to focus on aspects of diversity and inclusiveness that are inexpensive, such as outreach, because having to consider fair wages for undergraduates, graduates and postdoctoral fellows with every grant means less left over for “facilities and administrative costs” or for important research supplies for the lab. Outreach is essential to broadening the pool of potential scientists, but if we are going to encourage young people of every stripe to choose careers in science, we have to also be sure that science is a viable option for them when it comes time to pay the rent. If we want to get serious about diversity, we have to get serious about wages, even if it means further dividing our limited research funding.

It’s time that we started thinking of science careers as working-class careers and the work we do as research scientists as real work, not just “education” that happens to get papers published and grants funded. So long as science is a career open only to those who can afford it, we will never have the diversity we claim to desire.

Kim A. Russo is a graduate student researcher and instructor at UC Berkeley.

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