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General Motors has announced a new partnership with education nonprofit Girls Who Code that's intended to encourage more young women to pursue STEM subjects. The auto manufacturer will offer up a $250,000 grant to help fund after-school STEM clubs in schools, universities, and community centers.
"Becoming an engineer paved the way for my career," said GM CEO Mary Barra in a statement posted to the company's website. "It's one of the reasons I am passionate about promoting STEM education to students everywhere. Partnering with Girls Who Code is one more step in GM's commitment to inspiring and growing diverse future leaders."
[...] GM and Girls Who Code are pursuing this collaboration is [sic] response to the decreasing proportion of women in jobs related to computing, even as the field continues to grow. In 1995, 37 percent of the computing workforce was comprised of women, but today that has shrunk to 24 percent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:32PM
"Being a woman paved the way for my career."
This is why diversity promotions suck. You promote one person on diversity basis and he or she will ensure everyone under him or her knows that diversity is the non-negotiable.
In a time where women are preferred 200% in STEM over men, men are dropping out in large numbers out of colleges, men are doing worse in schools, who exactly is this going to help and how is it going to fight gender equality.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:52PM
In a time where women are preferred 200% in STEM over men, men are dropping out in large numbers out of colleges, men are doing worse in schools, who exactly is this going to help and how is it going to fight gender equality.
What's really bad is that companies in America are constantly whining that they can't find enough qualified STEM workers. So instead of getting training/education for the people who are actually interested but can't afford it (because there's no scholarships for them), they keep pursuing the people who already DO have lots of scholarships available, but just aren't interested in those fields.
On top of it all, they do everything they can to make these careers miserable, such as pushing "open plan" office arrangements for careers that require quiet and concentration. This just makes people like me trash the profession any time some kid or his parent asks about it, pushing more young people away from it. My standard advice for smart kids is to go into medicine somewhere; I wish I had gone that route.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:05PM
Lol, are you seriously blaming women for open plan offices?
Just as an FYI, you can thank this asshole [wikipedia.org] for "inventing" and promoting them as efficient a hundred years ago. And whoever is your company's accountant is for pushing them now.
At a particularly shitty company I was at a few years ago my (male) boss's boss decided unilaterally to "save money" by moving the entire development team to an open floor plan. The only thing you can do when that happens is change jobs. It's solid evidence your employer doesn't give a shit about you or the quality of your work.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:29PM
Of course he isn't blaming women. Check your reading comprehension, "ikanreed"; you've chosen the dumbest interpretation.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:33PM
It can get worse than open plan offices.
A buddy of mine used to work as a consultant at Price-Waterhouse Coopers. Their "desks" looked like a shelf in a bookshelf, arranged in aisles like a library. And even those they had to check out every day when they got to the office. It was a practice called "hotelling." The bean counters decided it was more efficient for the bottom line that way, and would de-construct the territoriality that arises when people gun for the corner offices. As an employee it meant you were utterly dehumanized and could not even keep a picture of your kids at your station without the cleaning staff throwing it out at night. My buddy's classmate from grad school had also landed a job there and would weep every morning at the thought of going back there.
After seeing that it made absolute sense why people would go postal.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @01:26PM
"Hotelling" is atrocious. It was started in one of the companies I had worked as a contractor, the description of my former coworkers can be summarized in one word: "atrocious". It is pure BS policy & very bad for team engagement...
Here is another good one I've experienced: in another company, where contractors (60 to 80% of the team, depending on which team you were) are treated like 2d class. For instance: you didn't get a full desk. We had to fit 3 contractors on 2 desks. I leave to your imagination the problems to fit the monitors, documents, problems with left-handed people sitting besides right-handed (mouse issues), etc.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 11 2017, @10:27PM
Lol, are you seriously blaming women for open plan offices?
Wow, you should get an award for stupidest comment of the day for this one.
In case it isn't obvious (it is, just not to you apparently), I'm blaming the crappy state of the industry and the work environment (including open-plan offices) for the reason many people don't want to go into it, and especially why women don't want to go into it.
Your "particularly shitty company" anecdote isn't exceptional: that's now the *norm* in this industry. These stories are not uncommon at all. It makes perfect sense to me that smart young women hear about this stuff and find out what jobs in this industry are like, and see firsthand what their future coworkers are like in class, and run the other direction, changing their majors to something else. If I had a daughter, I'd strongly discourage her from going into computing fields, and push her into medicine or law. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:42PM
When I produce too few of something I generally tend to try and find the bottleneck. 24% participation rate, and shrinking, looks like a bottleneck to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:49PM
Its just moving goal posts to rationalize bigotry.
Minorities are under-employed in technical fields.
Response: You can't blame employers, they can hire people that don't exist.
Employers invest in education programs intended to create more minority job candiates.
Response: This is just reverse-bigotry. You shouldn't help the people on the bottom, you should help the people who aren't as reliably on top as they once were.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:57PM
Why in the world should it be the goal of a company to make more "minorities" hirable? Surely, the goal should be to make operations more profitable! The only way the former could ever cast a shadow over the latter is through indoctrination or subsidy; indoctrination never speaks as loudly as money, so the cause of all this is likely subsidy, and the only organization that could supply subsidies for such a stupid goal is the government.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Thursday January 12 2017, @01:23PM
Why in the world should it be the goal of a company to make more "minorities" hirable?
Because the choice they face is:
1. Do nothing, and society will force them to be more responsible and raise taxes to pay for it anyway. The money might not be spent training the type of candidates they want.
2. Do it themselves, get the people and skills they want, and look good at the same time so that society feels less need to regulate and tax them.
Business is not some sacred church that operates separate to the rest of society.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 12 2017, @05:13PM
You really think that in the Brave New Trump World that "society" is somehow going to regulate and tax companies for not being diverse enough? What are you smoking? Big business has owned government in this country for quite some time now, and it's only going to get much worse in 2017.
Finally, companies aren't training candidates. Have you not noticed that? They only want people who already have experience in stuff. You can see this in all the job postings, and it's a common complaint in the industry. Training costs money, waiting 6-12 months for an employee to "come up to speed" costs money, so companies don't do it; they want someone else to bear that cost for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:51PM
But where are those people going? I bet you'll find large increases of women in managerial roles, especially bureaucratic roles in large quasi-governmental organizations such as universities.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:26PM
Exactly. Even in engineering, the women who do go into this field usually end up getting out of true engineering roles pretty quickly. They move into management of some kind, or they get sick of the field and go into something entirely different.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 11 2017, @10:16PM
It's not a bottleneck, it's a lack of interest. There's more women than men in college now; the ratio is about 60/40 last I heard. Women are advancing in professional fields farther than ever before. It's only in STEM (and especially in computer-related fields) where they're way behind, and falling. They actually had higher representation in the past.
So people are trying to encourage more women to get involved, and instead they're getting less involved. Continuing to encourage them seems to fit the definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result. After all, how much outreach has there been to get women involved in other professional fields like medicine and law?
Maybe the problem isn't with a lack of outreach to women in computing. Maybe the problem is with the profession itself not being attractive to women, and the women are doing the right thing by avoiding it and going into professions that fit them better (like medicine and law).
Anecdotally, I was just reading a thread on HN today about open-place workspaces, and there were people on there talking about how they loved this work environment, and working with a group of other guys, staying up really late, playing loud music, etc. Tell me how a frat-boy work culture like that is supposed to be attractive to professional women. This is what programming has become these days in many cases. And maybe there isn't loud music in most workplaces, but open-plan offices are now undeniably the norm, and pushing long hours has been the norm for as long as I've been in the industry. Don't forget all the outsourcing too. It certainly isn't a profession that is suitable for professional women who want to earn a great salary, have a stable job, avoid sexual harassment, and who want to have children at some point. Women like that, who are smart enough to earn a tough degree, are much better suited for other professions, such as becoming a doctor or surgeon where they can make far more money and not worry about their job being outsourced and being forced to train their replacement, and where they'll be doing far more meaningful work to boot instead of just wasting their life writing some stupid app that won't be around in a few years.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:13AM
Can you really blame anyone for not getting so excited about a career in the STEM field if you will intend to have a family? [ocregister.com]
I did STEM all my life. Just "officially" retired last year. It was fun. Well, most of it was until the last decade when the new management methods started making the rounds.
I always felt very insecure of having the responsibility of providing for a family based on the vagrancies of being so expendable, so that was the price I paid for being in STEM.
Had it been strictly money I wanted, and the stability to raise a family, I would have gone more into something like law, medicine, accounting, or helping business comply with government mandates. But my heart just wasn't in it. STEM is too much like music or the arts. One must have a love for creating things to do this. One sees lots of poor but very talented musicians, paint artists, sculptors, along with engineers.
Looking back on my life, I always was in the top of my class, determined to understand exactly what I was doing, but too damned determined to do things my way, which was my downfall. I could not stomach doing stuff some way I knew was wrong just to please someone else.
Kids: Go into STEM for the same reason you would study music: Your heart is here, and if you were doing anything else, this is where your mind would be.
And like the rest of us, you will spend a lot of time in frustration, wondering why companies spend so much money to do it wrong, yet hire people at several times your income to make sure you never work there.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday January 12 2017, @06:42AM
But don't you think a man saying he is producing less of something related to women is inherently male chauvinistic?</sarcasm>
Lets put it this way. Which of the following is gender equality about: (A) A process that doesn't care about your gender (B) A process that ensures that an arbitrary ratio of genders is always maintained irrespective of requirement. From my experience, people switch between these two definitions at will as long as it means giving money to women. Even if you disagree with my assertion, you have to admit that (A) removes politicking while (B) creates a metric just to do politicking.
Just to be clear, I am on record here and on the old-website defending the statement that women are equally smart and capable. But for me (A) actually solves a problem once and for all while (B) is just there to ensure the problem never gets solved.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:57PM
Yep, it's definitely not the case that women get worse paying careers on average, and within a given career they're paid less, and that controlling for every possible confounding factor they're still paid less.
Those are absolutely emblematic markers of being advantageous in one's career, and not literally the opposite. Certainly she's not underrepresented in the rank of CEO with 5% of people in her position sharing her gender. Being a woman is obviously how you get ahead there.
There's absolutely no chance that casual observation of virtually any available observational evidence raising serious questions as to whether you're off your goddamn rocker.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:34PM
When it comes to male-dominated fields, most women workers are—in my experience—nearly incompetent; the few women who are competent are geniuses, and are just simply exceptional individuals, an exception that proves the rule.
What I've noticed is that it's not the case that including women improves a team; rather, it's the case that a good team can afford to include women.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Wednesday January 11 2017, @07:42PM
You're right, it's definitely not the case, since the truth of a compound statement of this form requires all elements to be true, and this is only partially true (and completely deceptive.)
"Worse paying careers on average" - that one's true. Good job, I always say lead with the best thing you have.
"within a given career they're paid less" - eh, sort of yes. They also put in fewer hours of work for that smaller amount of money, however. Arguably true, but deceptive in the context you have put it.
"controlling for every possible confounding factor they're still paid less" - and now you slide all the way into full on falsehood. Because once you control for a few well known and quite obvious confounding factors this "wage gap" magically disappears. Yes, the average woman has made less money than the average man of the same age. She's also worked fewer hours in better conditions and taken more time off. She's much less likely to have died on the job or committed suicide because of unbearable stress. These are 'confounding factors' but you're completely overlooking them and attributing their effect to anti-female sexism.
In reality, it's more complicated, and probably more true to say it's the result of *pro-female* sexism. No one's organizing campaigns to encourage more women to enter mining or fishing or sanitation.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:09PM
No one's organizing campaigns to encourage more women to enter mining or fishing or sanitation.
Women in Mining Foundation [womeninmining.org]
International Women's Fishing Association [iwfa.org]
Angling for gender equality in the seafood industry [fao.org]
National Waste & Recycling Association Women’s Council [wasterecycling.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:11PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:12PM
Nice job moving those goalposts.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:18PM
You haven't tackled the actual summation, however, because you can't dispute it. Women are not treated as property in the US or in any developed country, they are not second class citizens, they are not a minority, and when they are treated differently it is almost always *in their favor.* Those are simply facts.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:28PM
If you had made an argument that was more than a wordy version of "nuh-uh" I would've addressed it. Since you didn't, and "yes-huh" would've been redundant, I could only address your factually incorrect statement.
I'll also point out that your statement was absolutely, indisputably, FALSE. Being completely wrong is a bit more than a technicality.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:44PM
I checked out women in mining. Nice quarterly newsletter. Appears to be about 20 women at the national level who go on field trips to mines. It appears none of them work in mining and are mostly appear to be elder members of the traditional cat lady industries. The president, I kid you not, is a graybeard dude, unless he's trans I donno about that. They appear to be self funded, or if they're getting grants they're stiffing their donors by never advertising.
Girls who code, in comparison appears to receive huge steaming piles of funding from every megacorporation, SV startup, and NASDAQ member. Hats off to them for acquiring lots of money while doing apparently nothing with it, or doing nothing that requires money. I imagine salaries are nice and high at that charity.
There's a whole weird segment of American business revolving around finding a problem, collecting money, and not doing a damn thing about it other than paying salaries and collecting even more money. WIM is not like that. Girls who code, well, I'm just saying I'm seeing wheelbarrows of money going in and ... a nice looking website and volunteers guide going out. That money's going somewhere. I'm not even claiming somewhere illegal. I now have a lot more respect for WIM than GHC, just sayin.
Twenty female mining fans seem to actually accomplish more documented "action" with basically no money, so I have to respect the female miners more that the girls who code inc. The problem with your goalposts comment is WIM budget looks like its about 3 or 4 digits about like a small cub scout pack both in funds and activity level, whereas you claim thats equivalent to a fundraising industry professional non-profit NGO with maybe a 8 digit budget, and they're hardly the only group pimping one of the dozens of variations of "girls in stem".
So sure, moving the goal posts seems fair when the claim is a budget of zero and you found a whomping 3 or 4 digits, but its unfair to compare that to one fundraising org that runs 8 or so digits in a movement at least ten times as big. Find us a "women in waste handling services" movement with a billion dollar budget and get back to us.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:05AM
I followed you on checking out WIM, and I have to say I am also impressed with them. No bullshit, and a genuine enthusiasm for their subject goes a hell of a long way.
They also seem to be aiming primarily at anyone who might be interested, with an emphasis on females, rather than pushing it on just a bunch of girls who don't want to know about it.
This is the way gender equality should be pushed. Men and women are different and that is inevitably going to result in unequal participation in fields. As long as no one is coerced out of or into a field solely because of their gender, I don't see a problem.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:46PM
So you assume she got promoted based on her gender and not on her ability.
I'm not one to throw sexism allegations around but that's pretty much the dictionary definition right there.
(Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday January 12 2017, @02:48AM
So you assume she got promoted based on her gender and not on her ability.
But is it true? Lets see you, with a straight face, say it couldn't possibly be true. We have at CEO at "Government Motors" who, as the first female CEO, instantly embarks on "diversity" initiatives. If I were picking the most likely Fortune 500 "Affirmative Action Hire CEO" she sounds like a strong candidate.
And that is the problem isn't it? Once everyone knows what affirmative action is, they start suspecting any member of a "protected^Wprivileged group" of being promoted far beyond their competence, especially when they are having media puff pieces written about how "groundbreaking" they are. Rage against the injustice all you want, I know it happens, YOU know it happens and the people who get the unearned positions know it too. Just look at the SCOAMF who will, thankfully, be leaving in nine more days, who as the first Affirmative Action POTUS was promoted far too high, far too fast and fell flat on his face.
Happens all the time in the workplace, especially in fields like hers where the number of candidates who are even qualified to the point where they won't "kill too many" customers" with her incompetence is so low they hire any female engineer they can find, Hell the headhunters fight over them as they all seek to meet quotas so as to keep the Dept of Labor off their asses. She was destined for the boardroom on that basis alone, even before the Federal Government essentially became a majority stakeholder.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mojo chan on Thursday January 12 2017, @01:29PM
But is it true? Lets see you, with a straight face, say it couldn't possibly be true. We have at CEO at "Government Motors" who, as the first female CEO, instantly embarks on "diversity" initiatives. If I were picking the most likely Fortune 500 "Affirmative Action Hire CEO" she sounds like a strong candidate.
That's a textbook example. When a woman does make it, suggest it may be because of her gender. On the other hand, if someone suggests that the male CEOs had an easier time getting to that level because they are male, it can't possibly be true and business is a perfect meritocracy.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday January 12 2017, @05:23PM
If a white male is in a position everyone assumes he earned it, since he doesn't have PC privilege. The notable exception that demonstrates the point is when the guy is the son of the last boss, then he is always having to prove he deserves to be there... and often fails. In other words he suffers the same undermining of employee confidence that an Affirmative Action hire does.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:51PM
men are dropping out in large numbers out of colleges
Let's be clear about what the actual trend is. Yes, women now make up the majority of people who attend college. Yes, women now graduate from college at higher rates than men. BUT it's NOT true that "men are dropping out... of colleges" in larger numbers than before.
In fact, let's be clear that overall the percentage of the young population (in the U.S.) with college degrees is higher than it has ever been in history. AND the percentage of population of YOUNG MEN with college degress is higher than it has ever been in history. Say what you will about this article's [usnews.com] analysis of the gender pay gap, but look carefully at that first graph. The proportion of young men who chose to go to college or dropped out went up significantly from the mid 1970s through the mid 1990s, but the proportion of young men with college degrees has gone up more-or-less steadily over the past couple decades.
What we do know is that the proportion of women choosing to go college and sticking with it is EVEN HIGHER, and the rate of increase is faster.
This may still be a concerning trend, but all of this rhetoric about how men are dropping out or not completing education is NOT backed up by facts. Instead, men are completing education at greater numbers -- and completing more of it -- than ever before in history. The proportion of women doing the same is just rising even faster.
It also should be noted that surveys of high-school students tend to show that men aspire to college with lesser frequency [chronicle.com] than women.
So, for all of you who love to point out that maybe women simply aren't INTERESTED in STEM, so why should we be pushing them -- can we ask a similar question about men and college? If a larger proportion of men don't show interest in going to college, why are we so concerned about them? Maybe, like the women who choose to be teachers or nurses or whatever "stereotypical female jobs" some people think are appropriate, maybe a higher percentage of men than women are just pragmatic and don't see the point in accumulating a bunch of college debt, so they just want to jump into the workforce?
Or maybe both sides are being pragmatic here -- for whatever reason the gender paygap exists, it simply does. So whether it's because women tend to take more time off to raise families or because women don't want to work long hours or whatever rationale you might have -- the paygap still exists. SO, might it not be a more rational choice for more women to try to get higher education, which will increase their salary potential even with that paygap? While men may feel it's more pragmatic to take their chance without it by a few percentage points in the population?
I don't know. I'm not saying this is all the case. But for those who are willing to consider alternative reasons for things like why women don't go into STEM or why there's a gender paygap, are there no possible reasons why men might not be choosing college in an era where tuition fees and loan debt is insane?
And regardless of what you think of the answers to those questions, keep in mind that men aren't dropping out at historically high rates -- again, they're actually getting degrees at a higher rate than ever before in history.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:10PM
Oh, and if you need some more specific stats on the college dropout rate in particular, here's the table [ed.gov] from the National Center for Education Statistics that shows completion rates for bachelor's degrees after 4, 5, and 6 years, broken down by sex, race, etc. It only goes back to 1996, but you can see that the cohort of males graduating college within 6 years increased overall from 52% to 56.5%, while for females it increased from 58.2% to 61.9% over the same period.
Should we still be concerned about a college non-completion rate of ~40% for BOTH sexes? Yes, I think so. If nothing else because those without completed degrees are even less likely to be able to pay back education loans. So they likely made huge investments for little to no gain. Anyhow, my point is that there's no evidence of an increasing problem of male college dropouts; to the contrary, the percentage of completion for males is actually rising.