This news blurb caught my eye as a result of the issue of income inequality for women being raised in a different thread.
from
(snip)"SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley. It's where the women, and the minorities, aren't.
Hit any tech event from South of Market to Santa Clara, and you see the same cast of characters. Scores of young white men in T-shirts and hoodies. A fair number of Asians and south Asians. A few Hispanics. Rarely blacks. And a smattering of women.
It's a funhouse mirror image of the American workforce, which is 47% female, 16% Hispanic, 12% black and 12% Asian, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Google released its diversity numbers Wednesday after it (and most other tech firms) have spent years without disclosing such figures.
Just 1% of its tech staff are black. Two percent are Hispanic. The one well-represented minority group is Asians, who make up 34% of the company's tech workers. Eighty-three percent of Google's tech workers internationally are male. For non-tech jobs, the number is 52%.
The numbers are especially astounding for California, where 38% of the population is Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Asians make up 14% of the state.
At its heart, there are two reasons for the mismatch, experts say. The first is pipeline. White and Asian men are much more likely to have access and take advantage of technical schooling that leads to jobs at tech firms than historically disadvantaged minorities.
"Women and underrepresented minorities have been denied access to resources and opportunities that would allow them to enter and succeed in computer science," said Coleen Carrigan, an anthropologist who researches high-tech cultures.
Students coming from high schools where computer science, and especially AP computer science, isn't taught, start out with a tremendous disadvantage. That's something Londa Schiebinger, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, has learned from her students.
"Computer science education rewards students with early exposure to computers and fails to nurture those who are new to them and apprehensive," Carrigan said.
Finally, high tech isn't a very welcoming place if you don't fit in, Carrigan said."(snip)
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