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General Electric (GE) plans to employ 20,000 women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs by 2020 because the “male dominated” sectors are suffering from a “talent crisis for women,” the company said in a Feb. 8 announcement.
The goal is to obtain a “50:50” gender representation for all “technical entry-level programs,” a strategy GE claims is “necessary to inject urgency into addressing ongoing gender imbalance in technical fields.”
The announcement states that only 14% of engineers and 25% of IT professionals are women, according to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics. The company expects that a continued lack of women in such fields will affect productivity and diminish “the potential of digital and other new technologies.”
GE’s announcement coincides with their release of a white paper entitled Engineering the Future: The Socio-Economic Case for Gender Equality.
The paper blames the gender imbalance in STEM jobs on the “vicious cycle of expectations” in education, as well as the “lack of role models” women have in STEM industries.
Female employees of GE in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
(AP and GE Annual Report, 2013)
“The low percentage of women” holding STEM jobs “implies that female students are less likely to consider those sectors,” reads the paper, “and they have fewer female role models to inspire them to choose a career in tech.”
A failure to address this, GE wrote, “is like leaving money on the table – it creates a substantial economic cost.” To rectify the situation, “companies, governments, and other organizations” must “work together to put the right system of incentives and support mechanisms in place.”
GE’s “holistic approach” to bridging the gender gap includes expanding the pool of universities from which GE recruits talent, “with more focus on institutions that have a contemporary gender mix.” GE will also offer “benefits that foster an inclusive culture,” including parental leave and childcare.
Simply attracting women to STEM careers is not enough, however. “Retaining and promoting female workers in a so far male-dominated field is the next step in addressing this issue,” says GE.
Good idea or should people stop worrying about how many of a certain race or gender is in a certain field?
Good idea or should people stop worrying about how many of a certain race or gender is in a certain field?
Bad idea. Choosing employees based on what they have between their legs is blatant sexism. There are women dominated fields such as nursing (who many make as much or more than STEMs) and education for example, but you don't see these businesses announcing how sad it is that there is such few men.
Sex quotas and race quotas/incentives/handicaps, whatever you want to call them, completely miss the objective of civil equality. It's reverse sexism in that now a qualified person possessing male genetalia will have to work harder for the same position at GE because he does not possess a vagina, and for that reason alone.
Employment selection should be based only on things that can be changed, not unchangable qualities determined at birth.
Good idea or should people stop worrying about how many of a certain race or gender is in a certain field?
Ideally, that would be what we should do - but we also should work to help women enter STEM fields. That must start early in their lives, of course, but employers can help, too, by incentivizing women to enter these fields.
I'm a male in a male-dominated area of biological research (which is usually pretty evenly split between men and women), and I think it'd be great to have more women in the field.
I think it gets tricky when you pick candidates just because they are women (that shouldn't happen)...but there are ways to incentivize women to join this field in other ways that don't involve some sort of affirmative action solution...such as internship incentives (perhaps have women-only internships early on when students are in high school or college - get them interested in the fields at that point).
And once you get more qualified women entering the field, a feedback loop develops back to younger children (who see these positive women role models in STEM fields and then think "hey, I should do this! This is cool!").
This is basically about challenging concepts of what fields go with which gender...we've done a lot of great work here as a society in the last few decades, but we still need to do a better job of breaking down those barriers for our upcoming generations.
Does this mean they will be turning away perfectly good candidates simply because they don't have the right "equipment" down there?
That would be a repeat of the many decades women were perfectly good candidates but were turned away simply because they didn't have the right equipment down there.
The best-qualified person should get the job regardless of race or gender. This should be done through testing and the ability to pass the tests.
The problem is that the best person doesn't get the job. The guy usually gets the job.
They've done this study over and over where they put the exact same resume and a guy's name and a girl's name at the top and the guy gets more offers for higher salary.
Ideally, that would be what we should do - but we also should work to help women enter STEM fields. That starts early in their lives, of course, but employers can help, too, by incentivizing women to enter these fields.
I'm a male in a male-dominated area of biological research (which is usually pretty evenly split between men and women), and I think it'd be great to have more women in the field. I think it's get tricky when you pick candidates just because they are women...but there are ways to incentivize women to join this field in other ways (which could involve internship incentives).
why? Why not just let girls make whatever decisions they want?
The problem is that the best person doesn't get the job. The guy usually gets the job.
They've done this study over and over where they put the exact same resume and a guy's name and a girl's name at the top and the guy gets more offers for higher salary.
BS. There are already laws against that and already affirmative action programs. And if a woman cannot negotiate for a higher salary that is her fault
Ideally, that would be what we should do - but we also should work to help women enter STEM fields. That must start early in their lives, of course, but employers can help, too, by incentivizing women to enter these fields.
I'm a male in a male-dominated area of biological research (which is usually pretty evenly split between men and women), and I think it'd be great to have more women in the field.
I think it's get tricky when you pick candidates just because they are women (that shouldn't happen)...but there are ways to incentivize women to join this field in other ways (which could involve internship incentives), and once you get more qualified women entering the field, a feedback loop develops to younger children (who see these positive women role models in STEM fields).
Why force it if they don't want to do that? Why is it so important to incentive women to do something that they themselves haven't decided to do? This is the same thing as people saying police departments are racist because they don't hire more blacks although no blacks applied. I don't get it.
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