SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.