CSE40175: Diversity in Tech
If you have ever walked into an University-level engineering lecture hall, it should come to no surprise that there is a diversity problem in the tech industry. The homogenous classrooms of white and asian males will graduate and turn into homogenous offices of white and asian males. This “pipe problem” however can be solved. Not by just hiring more women and minorities but rather encouraging more women and minorities to pursue degrees in engineering.
Although Bonnie Marcus, contributor to this Forbe’s article, downplays the “pipeline problem”, the statistics could not be more supportive of it. According to PBS, only 17% of workers in tech positions at Google are female and only 6% are non-asian and non-white. This is also similar at other big tech companies for Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft all feature women in less than 20% of all tech positions. If we analyze the numbers of engineering enrollment at universities, the parallels between the workplace and the classrooms are evident. According to startclass, women on average make up of 19% of engineering majors at the university level and Black and Hispanic students only make up 11% of engineering majors ( figure 1 & figure 2). Therefore, if tech companies simply hired more minorities and women (like Salesforce did), the numbers might show equality in the workplace, but the underlying problems will still exist. Therefore, in order to really diversify the workplace, we need to attack the pipe line issue at the root. Programming needs to be taught at more schools across the nation so more children can be exposed to them. Furthermore, programs like the National Center for Women & Information Technology, which raises awareness about careers in engineering fields for minority women, will help bridge the racial and gender gap for the tech industry.
This diversity issue, if solved, can be beneficial to the tech industry and the country in many ways. Like Martin Fowler mentions, having a diverse set of people, will give us diverse ways of thinking. Therefore, problems that may be overlooked by all male and all white programmers, could be solved if the programmers came from different backgrounds. Furthermore, the different ways of thinking will improve innovation, as apps and software could be written for women, by women. Lastly, if more hispanics, blacks and women join the engineering field, there would be more engineers to choose from. More engineers means better chances of finding great ones. Therefore, the country could have better engineers tackling the toughest of problems.
