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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: 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.