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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: 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.