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Microsoft Uses US Women's Soccer Team To Explain Why It Doesn't Hire More Women
theodp writes: "It is not surprising that the U.S. women have been dominant in the sport [of soccer] in recent years. The explanation for that success lies in the talent pipeline," writes General Manager of Citizenship & Public Affairs Lori Forte Harnick on The Official Microsoft Blog. "Said another way, many girls in the U.S. have the opportunity to learn how to play soccer and, as a result, they benefit from the teamwork, skill development and fun involved. That's the kind of opportunity I would like to see develop for the technology sector, which presents a different, yet perhaps even more significant, set of opportunities for girls and young women. Unfortunately, the strength in the talent pipeline that we see in female soccer today is not the reality for technology. The U.S. is facing a shortage of Computer Science (CS) graduates. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent." Going with the soccer analogy, one thing FIFA realized that Microsoft didn't is that if you want girls to play your sport, you don't take away their ball!
When I studied CS there were 5 women and 200 guys in my class. With that in mind, complaining about an IT company not hiring many woman is nonsense.
Not everyone in IT even needs a STEM degree. A lot of position are more about soft skills anyways. There are also people who thrive in tech positions without a STEM degree.
I even know someone that managed to get promoted into IT off of a factory floor.
This is more about the consequences of large corporations treating their employees like disposable cogs to be laid off by the "Two Bobs" guy during the next business lull. They are no longer wiling to invest in their own people, even the ones that have gone to great effort and expense to be desirable as new hires.
You don't have to be terribly talented to be a tech worker in the large companies. Actually, it helps if you're not.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why don't you try offering them MORE MONEY
Because gender discrimination in pay is illegal.
Fortunately, in technology as in soccer, nobody has taken away the ball, and the women that are interested in the field have just as much if not more opportunity than males to learn, study and pursue a career in Computer Science, and the whole article is bullcrap.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Is this statistic really true? Are those 140,000 net new jobs, or just job openings that exist for some period of time during the year?
The article cites but does not link to a source for this statistic.
Also, a CS degree is a long, tough slog through dull material that has dubious relevance to most jobs that require a CS degree.
Those are 140,000 openings, so you don't necessarily need new graduates to fill them. You can fill them from other companies (which in theory leaves the same number of openings, but most companies don't fill voids, they just make the other people work harder), or you can fill them from unemployed CS people, of which there are tens of thousands, if not more. There are at least 6,000 more as of a week ago, when Microsoft, the company complaining about the worker shortage, fired 6,000 people.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent."
And this would be a logical inference if the only people looking for jobs were that year's college graduates.
But, actually, very few job openings are filled by fresh-outs.
Conclusion: mIsleading and false.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Of course, there are not 140,000 new jobs. There are a whole bunch of layoff's, office closures that puts a bunch of programmers out of work [like, say, Microsoft did not too long ago].
There are a whole bunch of already-graduated programmers that are explicitly rejected from these 'new jobs' because they can't afford to work cheap enough.
H1B's to the rescue!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!