In October of 2009, the Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineer (CEOSE) held a symposium on Women of Color in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; NSF-OAI). The symposium featured data pertaining to Asian, African American, Hispanic, and Native American women and their participation in STEM. It is critical to become familiar with this data, because the numbers of underrepresented women in STEM are sparingly small. Ultimately, this has an impact on diversity and excellence in academia for faculty and students. These data are a call to action. If we value diversity and excellence at our institutions, we must consider how we recruit, advance, and retain underrepresented women (URM) faculty and also how we recruit, retain, and graduate the URM students who could one day join us in the faculty ranks.