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posted by on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-not-moving-to-Detroit dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:51PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:51PM (#452684) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:10PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday January 11 2017, @09:10PM (#452697) Journal

    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.