Tech's Gender and Race Gap Starts In High School

An anonymous reader writes "Diversifying the tech industry is a prominent topic these days, with much analysis being done on colleges and companies that employ software engineers. But exam data shows the gap is created much earlier — it's almost overwhelming even before kids get out of high school. From the article: 'Ericson's analysis of the data shows that in 2013, 18 percent of the students who took the exam were women. Eight percent were Hispanic, and four percent were African-American. In contrast, Latinos make up 22 percent of the school-age population in the U.S.; African-Americans make up 14 percent. (I don't need to tell you that women make up about half.) There are some states where not a single member of one of these groups took the test last year. No women in Mississippi or Montana took it. Seven states had no Hispanic students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota. And 10 states had no Black students take the exam: Alaska, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Utah. In some of these states, there simply aren't many students of any race or gender taking the test, which helps explain the dearth of young women and minorities. (Indeed, no women or minorities took the exam in Wyoming—but that's because no students at all took it.) But Idaho had nearly 50 students taking it, and Utah had more than 100.'"

Comments

It starts at conception

[jackspenn]

Why are we fixated on trying to artificially diversify professions?

The PC BS has to stop at some point. There are some professions and things that men prefer more than women and others that women prefer more than men.

I will give you one example of this insanity:

In the mid-nighties a friend of my parents came over all upset. She was a manager for a publisher and all except one of her editors were female. She explained that men did not have a strong desire to edit textbooks. The only male she could find that was both good and interested cost her over double the rate of any other female editor. The reason was that she had to hire him away from another employer so that she could meet a diversity requirement from some of the states who purchased her textbooks.

Well, this male editor ended up getting an even higher offer from a different publisher. As she sat at my parents table saying "Men just do not enjoy or wish to be editors as much as women do. How am I ever going to find enough men who are both good and interested in doing this job?"

It was at this point that my dad who worked in IT at the time walked in and heard this statement. He said "I have the same diversity issue at work, they would like to have more women in IT, but most women don't want to be in IT."

At this point my mom suggested the simple solution, she explained how my dad was paying good women more money than men to work in IT when he could find them and sometimes not as good women when he had nothing else. So my parents friend ended up hiring three not so good male editors and just had whatever they edited initially sent back through to other editors.

Was that fair? Was it right? No, it was what the government wanted.

People walk around saying "Diversity is our goal" or "Diversity unites us". Yeah, that last one goes up at a state office building each April, I go to their lobby just to laugh at their mini-ministry of truth.

The truth is so much simpler. Hire people who are interested in learning/growing in the areas related to their work. Don't worry about how the numbers turn out. The only reason companies worry about diversity is because of some BS forms some bureaucrats asks them to fill out. Don't let your world be shaped by this nonsense. If asked be honest, explain you do not discriminate, you only hire the best qualified.

(I agree, I do need an editor)

Re:here we go again...

[TheRaven64]

Because we want to get the best people. If you look worldwide, the gender balance (to pick the one imbalance your post mentions) is a lot closer to 50:50 in some countries, in others it's even more skewed. This implies that there's nothing intrinsic about women that makes them genetically less likely to want to do engineering or scientific things, there's some other cultural or social pressure stopping most of them. If we're only recruiting from 10% of the female population that, absent these pressures, would have gone into these subjects, then we can hope that it's the best 10%, but that's not very likely.