Why are there so few black people in STEM?
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There were 4-5 weeks at different where I just ran out money and sat on bed instead of eating thinking I couldn't be hungry is I was sleep. I usually found enough money to collect to buy a bag of rice for the month. But regardless of race this is hard. Given there no attempt to help anyone with anything as simple as a food shelter on college campus why would they stay.
It's kind of un-nerving watching some engineers friends discuss this. It's kind of arrogant and presumptuous. I'm not even close to the smart person I grew up with. When they discuss that maybe black people may not have the intellect, that I know a guy who was forced to work a meat packing plant that could run circles around you in any STEM subject, but wasn't given the opportunity or was willing to starve himself for the chance.
I think the US leaves a lot of talent on the cutting room floor especially those interested in subject we deem essential. It's pretty saddening.
Guess which was the undeniably most common issue among people failing two classes or more? Financial insecurity.
It's hard figuring out a solution there as that was in a country with cheap (not free but still) education.
I've noticed a difference in success from my associates who worked in college and did not.
Those who worked no jobs, or worked jobs that were close to their career were able to either network in school or network through those jobs, helping them in their careers.
Those who had to work retail or similar jobs had a much more difficult time getting their career paths started.
Would it have been better to part time both job and college? Instead of 3-4 yrs for a degree, it takes 6-8 years, but you also work part time during.
This route exists for many colleges - why not do this?
Graduated without any debt, but it was rediculously hard, especially in years 4-5.5 when I lost my job (2008 recession) and survived solely off rice, turkey hotdogs, and whitebread (leaving barely enough to cover diapers/medical.
Looking back though, the experiences and situations were so formative I sometimes wonder if to change them would be to dilute and erase oneself.
Make education funding federal, and have a nationwide push to have small classes and well funded schools for everybody, and this would be fixed in 10 years. As it is, rich districts pay more taxes and get better schools. Funny that.
Baltimore City has less than half the local education funding of Anne Arundel (a predominantly white, upper middle class county containing Annapolis and the Naval Academy). But state and federal funding more than makes up for it. Baltimore gets $12,200 per student from the state, versus $5,300 for Anne Arundel. And it gets an extra almost $1,000 from the federal government. In all, Baltimore getting about $3,000 more per student than Anne Arundel. Allegheny County, a mostly white but lower income county, also gets significantly more funding. Note that cost of living is also higher in Anne Arundel than the other two places.
In most states, poorer districts actually get slightly more funding than richer districts: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-....
Only 36% of Black kids live with married parents: https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FT_18...
Stop giving additional welfare to single-parent households.
Experiments in Brazil and India suggest that the really simple, dumb solution works best: give poor people money, no strings attached.
Sure, they'll waste some of it. But not all that much, maybe a third. To economists, that's very effective targeting.
(If you demand perfect targeting and use of funds here, why not with private-sector investments (67%-90% loss rate) or 'normal' government investments (50% - 75% losses)? )
First is that the federal government doesn't have the legal standing to take over the education system. I believe it would require a constitutional amendment to allow it and I don't think they'd get that passed.
Secondly, I'm not sure it is such a great idea. Currently federal level education direction comes from the teachers union and you can see the fruits of its labors in our current schools. Also I think this will make the current broken system harder to fix as it will institutionalize many of the current practices and make local experimentation much harder.
IMO what we need to do is move away from the industrial revolution era school system. We aren't training a bunch of factory workers anymore and that needs to be reflected in how we teach. We really need to do a lot more trials with alternative educational styles in public school. My understanding is that one of the biggest hurdles to this is the teachers union and their adherence to the current model.
I do think funding is an issue, but even if you could magically fix that you'd still have bad schools. There would just be less disparity between them.
Nor does the federal government have to take over the education system to achieve this, it just has to guarantee equal funding for all students. Or the US can continue to set poor whites against poor blacks as it has now for centuries, and watch itself become increasingly uncompetitive with any country that makes a commitment to equal educational standards for all. "This used to be the greatest country in the world", etc.
There is plenty of debate about what makes for good schools. Many school districts are large enough to include neighborhoods on "both sides of the tracks". It is the same school district with the same pay, same class sizes, same teacher demographics, but different student body demographics. Result is often a large disparity in outcomes for students. In one school, a student who wants to succeed has to compete with his classmates who want the same thing. In another, the same student would be abused by classmates for trying to succeed. Parents in these latter districts will often make huge efforts to pretend to be living a few miles away to give their children not smaller classes or different teachers but different classmates.
The claim that good schools are good because of small class sizes and higher teacher pay, that it is as simple as that and that there is "really no debate" is false. Pointing out that A and B are not the only factors, it's not as simple as that, that there is plenty of debate, and describing an additional factor beyond just A & B is not "dismissing" A and B.
Consider the scenario I described: a large school district with multiple neighborhoods where the admin, funding, class sizes, teacher pay, etc., are the same but the student bodies differ. You might be able to equalize outcomes by giving the lower-performing school smaller classes and better-paid teachers, or you might not, but even if you did, you would then have to explain why a school with smaller classes and better-paid teachers wasn't doing any better than one without those features. The answer would remain the same: because there are other factors that matter, too. It's not as simple as just smaller classes and better pay for teachers, and there is plenty of debate about what factors matter and how much.
Parents are also somewhat a defense against bad teachers. There’s nothing quite like a parent hounding you and your principal about their child’s academic performance.
Poor discipline in a school can demoralise a teacher.
You also need to get rid of teachers who are badly underperforming. This can be very difficult, which is also demoralising.
I've gleaned the above from having many family and extended family members in teaching.
I knew what I wanted though. Every class had 1-2 students that were hungry to learn, rest were there because easy money or such. Eventually dropped out and had a successful start to a career. Far outpacing those that stayed in.
That was a awhile ago.
I know some school have way better curriculums these days.
Still, I refuse to hire jr develops unless I see that same hunger to get better.
As far as I'm aware, states that spend more per pupil don't significantly outperform those that spend less...
Since the US Dept of Ed was created by Jimmy Carter, can you show positive results and benefits of this approach?
The Dept of Ed is pretty far removed from what the grandfather comment is advocating for, so I'm not sure why they would advocate for it.
It doesn't establish curricula, it doesn't run schools, it doesn't even run accreditations. 92% of current funding for primary and secondary education is state or local-level.
I struggle to see how this is wrong. It's not any different than rich people buying private education, though it makes it easier for non-rich folks to try and find the cheapest place in that district so they can benefit from the well-funded schools.
It seems popular to think that people should have equal opportunity, independent of any other factors. But from the perspective of a parent, why should I be disallowed from providing my own kids every possible advantage I can afford?
Because it's bad for society, and because there's a long since established moral precedent in favor of things that may make life slightly worse for any given individual but better for a large majority of everyone.
It's also worth keeping in mind that there's a massive difference between "rich" and "ultra-rich". "Rich" and "poor" are, if anything, closer to each other than either is to "ultra-rich", and spreading out the spending of that last category would dramatically benefit an overwhelming majority of people without hurting the schools of ultra-rich areas in a way that, frankly, anyone should actually care about.
That is a very big claim. It seems just as plausible to suggest that society will in fact be collectively better off if every parent gives their kid the best possible start in life, even if some kids will miss out due to circumstance.
I recall hearing from New Jersey and judges taking strict stances of equal outcome in education that found locality funding discriminatory, was that the poorer districts needed to be funded more per student to start to reach parity. Which makes some sense on some levels given knowledge and habits from parents transferring and would need more effort and funding to catch up because they are already providing more teaching just in a remotely middle-class concept.
That sort of equality is clear folly, like trying to force every kid into creches and separate them from parents. It might work with some hypothetical aliens but in practice for humans prepare for massive psychic trauma, inevitable abuse from caretakers, and frankly a well deserved outright insurrection and rebellion.
Don't get me wrong, working to raise the floor is a noble goal and makes sense just from rational selfishness alone. Throwing more money at the high end is 'dimminshed returns' but the money has already been allocated for better or worse. And well the obvious caveats of how the money is spent matters, there is no fixed true universal value per of any unit or commodity.
But, we also have to look at statistics and think longitudinally instead of anecdotally.
I came from a middle class family in a small town in the south. But my mom being a well connected high school math teacher did give me some advantages.
When I graduated from college, I had a choice between taking a job in a slightly larger city where I could have afforded to take care of myself or move to Atlanta where I could get a job as a computer operator based on a previous internship. But the pay was crap.
I wanted to move to Atlanta because I knew I would have more opportunities. My parents had already bought me car, they subsidized me for the first year, and the rest is history - I was able to network my way into getting a software development position. This was in the late 90s.
My classmate couldn’t afford to make those choices. He was stuck taking a COBOL programming job in the 90s - the same job I turned down and still is doing that to this day in the same city.
And from what I’ve been seeing, COBOL just isn’t going anywhere. Those mainframes really are built to last. So he should probably have a job for the rest of his life. I hope he’s got a nice pension.
We graduated in the mid 90s. The book was last updated in 1985. He told me he was still programming in COBOL. I just got quiet. I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to insult him.
Source: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...
Of course not all black people are poor, but that's a very poor understanding of statistics. Just because a black man became President or there are millionaire black men, doesn't mean that institutional racism is suddenly over or economic equality has been established.
If the average black family were wealthier than the average white family AND we would keep seeing such difference, it would be interesting to wonder why. But there is nothing new in poor people not being able to access to long studies.
The problem is poverty, not race.
Of course not, but what's your point? The stereotype is accurate. Go read the very article this discussion is about, and it says black families average about 2/3 the income of non-black families. That is reality, and wishing it away won't make it less true. If we want to figure out a long term solution, we can't deny uncomfortable truth.
I feel like I have to mention that I'm a black person here.
If this was too difficult to understand then I'll explain it differently. If there are environmental differences between races such as socioeconomic background then you can fix things like educational attainment by improving the socioeconomic background of black people. If there is no environmental difference or solving the environmental difference gives no improved outcomes then this basically means black people are somehow inferior to white people simply based on their race. I don't think that is true. Poor white people suffer from the same things poor black people suffer from so an explanation that is purely based on race is completely insufficient. However you want to deny the socioeconomic differences and blame the differences in ability entirely on race.
Or it means perfectly competent black people are excluded simply because they are black; because the white people who gate-keep academic institutions are racist.
Drugs and crime have destroyed the family structure in all poor neighborhoods.
Frankly there is a strong anti-education bent moving through the entire Republican party, educated people hare harder to control.
There are certainly people who can surmount these obstacles and fit in. Who have the charm and charisma to ingratiate themselves into any group in any place. I'm not one of those people. I'm not obligated to be one of those people. Those people are quite rare.
Another point: Perhaps there are fewer Black people in STEM because Black people have more pressing issues. If I were Black and intelligent, I'd probably be interesting in combating larger social issues and not biochemistry. But that's just me.
No. Most Black people don’t feel any more of a calling to “combat larger social issues” than anyone else.
Yes, I worked at one company where I was the only Black person out of maybe 200 people until another one of my friends got hired based on my referral. They constantly mixed up our names when talking to us.
We were on a conference call once and my friend “John” was talking and one of our coworkers in another state mixed us up and said we “sound a like”. My friend was from up north and had a Boston accent. I have a southern accent. We sound nothing a like.
I am not saying that the company didn’t have any Black peoples because it was racist. The company was based in another state that was about a two hour drive. I would go there and not see any other Black people. We worked in a satellite office.
I was also in the awkward position of being in the city of the main office during Election Day 2016. As the only minority it seemed like in the entire city where people were driving around in their pickup trucks with their confederate flags and MAGA bumper stickers.
I have that experience. In my 6th and 7th grade I attended a school in rural Tanzania. It was in the years following Tanzania's independence from colonial rule and there was a certain resentment towards us Europeans harbored by (many) teachers and students, and I was many times harassed and/or ridiculed, and subjected to corporal punishment for the slightest offense (in my own view at least). I have plenty of "charm and charisma" (again in my own view!) but could never get accustomed to the treatment. And indeed felt I shouldn't have to and so was eventually taken out and home schooled instead.
Now, did this break me, make me despondent or not believe in myself? It id not, and the reason is context. Because even if (many) young Tanzanians resented us Europeans, many if not most of the elderly did not. As a 12 year old it was not uncommon for me to be greeted with "shikamoo"(roughly meaning "I kiss the dust off your feet"), a greeting normally reserved for really old people - and people within the colonial administration. I was also treated as someone potentially very rich (not that I was, except relatively only). I still did not come away from the experience completely unscathed but that is another story.
I could go on but in short; being singled out or even maltreated on basis of skin color because people see you as privileged is something quite different than being disrespected because your skin color signals relative under-privilege. Which should give pause I believe. It may take a long while yet until our ethnically related appearances no longer play any role in our relationships.
I've noticed of them have become pretty alt right in recent years though, a lot of it arising out of resentment on being accused of having benefited from white privilege when they get they were afforded neither the opportunites of wealth or acceptance/fitting-in growing up because they weren't the right kind of white growing up all the societal support, sympathy and recognition of their hardships now because they're too white.
When I started, I could only say my name. Within a year, I was fluent. After 3 years, I was made to skip a grade. I stood out, but knowing I was better than all those kids at their own native language was quite the ego boost.
Later on, the same race, combined with the language fluency, allowed me to blend in, so I was spared from most negative experiences that immigrants face.
I’ve transitioned through many roles in my careers, and remained very interested in this topic, so I notice the black makeup of each company. In St Louis, a city with about 50% black population, I consulted on a few projects. These companies employed a few African Americans, as security guards, but the engineers were about 50% white and 50% Indian.
In Florida, I consulted on another project. Every black engineer had the accent of a Caribbean native or African native. Judging by the accents, there were no American born black engineers.
I keep wondering if the H1Bs have out competed the black new college graduates, or if they’re simply not being given a chance at the jobs being filled by H1Bs.
Other companies have huge Infosys, TCS consulting presence, and those new engineering roles are filled without true competition from American workers, but doled out to new H1Bs.
I continue to think that an additional yearly salary tax should be levied on any H1B. This forces the employers to be financially aligned with employing US citizens. Ideally those taxes should for for STEM scholarships for the poor, increasing the US pool of these supposedly in demand engineers.
https://www.deccanherald.com/business/business-news/another-...
Black unemployment hit an all-time low this year:
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/irUjPx0BNBh...
Which is partly thanks to tougher enforcement action against illegal immigrants:
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/410/cpsprodpb/A67A/production/...
If you want to help Americans, particularly Black Americans, the H1B visa needs to be ended, the refugee intake reduced to <10,000/year, the wall built, birth citizenship ended, and mass deportations of illegal immigrants to take place across the USA.
Stereotype threat makes people less likely to engage in psychologically risky feedback loops (bad grades, seeking feedback,...), and many higher STEM courses are riskier in this regard.
Many students are forced to engage in work-study programs or work part-time to get through college. STEM curricula (especially engineering) require dedication and ample time.
Pragmatics, higher education is the most expedient path to escaping poverty for the underserved. So pursuing more vocational fields like nursing, professional stuff over a risky long career in academia seems more fruitful.
If my anecdote adds any value: I went to a somewhat rigorous college where most of my STEM classes were mostly Asian or White and I was the usually the only black student. I experienced the stressors mentioned above, the financial one was especially painful.
12 years later, I wish I had chosen a less time consuming field like liberal arts instead of CS/Eng and had a somewhat enjoyable experience.
One of my close Asian friends (with comparable ability) is now a Math professor. His upper middle class background enabled him to pay for his college, and living expenses in grad school. It’s inconceivable that I could have taken a similar track given the reality constraints of my particular situation.
I hope you forgive me for the candor,but, at the home parenting level even in early life, kids have to be raised to pursue such fields or at least see others like them do well and succeed so they can draw inspiration. In other words, an asian american(or nigerian!) person pursuing STEM would not feel like they're swimming upstream and against the flow while america born black americans and many rural european americans would feel that way.
I don't presume that's all there is to it, but plenty of immigrants with terrible education spending in their 3rd world countries get full ride scholarships in STEM in the US. I am certain, it's not something solvable by throwing money at lower education. uni's in america are a cash grab scheme, so you are asking people to get into a lifetime of debt right now. Instead of depending on foreign workers, the US government on it's part should conditionally subsidize higher education for americans with the condition being they pursue in demand acadameic goals.
[1] https://www.chron.com/news/article/Data-show-Nigerians-the-m...
https://africacheck.org/reports/nigerian-immigrants-top-clas...
Is this claiming that students in homogeneous societies are at an advantage, because they are more likely to share their teacher's ethnicity?
Another perspective is that in a country with an ethnically homogeneous population, it becomes politically easier to push through reforms.
People tend to be heavily influenced by their environment as they grow up. And if the majority of your peers see X as being "cool", that's what a lot of people will try to achieve.
For example, during high school years, the "popular kids" are the jocks who play sports, not a geek who plays with code all day (although this has shifted a lot lately). If you look at it this way, the guys who go on to play an the NBA do it not because they are "underprivileged" and racially profiled to be kicked out of studying, but because that IS the valuable route they want to choose. Likewise, the current state of the music industry is heavily influenced by black culture. You could say pretty much everything is black culture influenced, from rap to r&b to Jazz to dance music. So a lot of black kids look up to those artists and creative people, and they strive to excel in those areas. I think that's great.
There's a reason why fighting arcade games and strategy games like Starcraft, WoW, etc. are dominated by Korean pro gamers. Nobody said blacks shouldn't play Starcraft or Tekken, nobody told white guys to stop playing. Koreans were simply heavily socially incentivized to be good at it.
Same goes for football (soccer). Nobody said Brazilians are the only privileged race on earth who are allowed to play football. They were just heavily socially incentivized to do so because that's what's considered of value.
Once you stop thinking as a victim and start thinking more positively, there are many explanations to the "mystery" you just can't seem to figure out.
p.s.
Just to be clear, I am not denying that racism exists. I would however like to point out that the people who keep blaming everything to racism are the ones who are actually subliminally racists.
More money helps to a point, but what these young people need more than anything is appropriate role models (engineers, scientists, etc). Yes, I know, easier said than done...
But there is a very real fact that certain peoples don't have access to computers. My wife grew up in a poor area, and they did not have a computer in their home until she was 16 when got a laptop as a gift.
I grew up poor, but as a foreigner with no real contact with others so I stayed mostly at home. My father used to love buying old cheap computers at garage sales, so I would mix and match hardware from the old computers and I managed to learn a lot.
Both of us grew up poor, but I grew up to be a programmer because I had plenty of access to computers while growing up. It was always natural to me, and it was hard for her.
Neither of us idolized gold chains or expensive shoes. I think what you're saying is a harmful and frankly, racist stereotype. Just because a family buys a $200 pair of shoes for their child on Christmas, doesn't mean that means the child shouldn't have access to computers. Rich families will give their kids expensive things as well as give access to computers.
I worked for a bit with a Cuban immigrant who studied CS to a high level (post bachelors) without a computer. As in the university and the whole of society didn't have access to computers because you know....communism. He correctly retorted at my shock of "how can you do CS without a computer" question to say the least.
source: Cuban family and emigres. Please don't talk to me about communism without reliable data.
Are you referring to the country's history of slavery, segregation and mass incarceration? Because I'd agree that "the environment" that black people are raised in is definitely shaped by racism, past and present. That you acknowledge its existence as a footnote makes me think you're underestimating the impact of 400 years of treating people as sub-human.
Maybe we should focus less on trying to identify and somehow solve systemic racism and more about making it culturally acceptable and desirable for black people to enter the STEM fields. Highlight the superstars in STEM who are kicking ass (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson) and encouraging people to identify with him and motivate them to work even harder.
What about suggesting whites are (hypothetically) over-represented because they've made attaining education a priority?
Forgive me for noticing, but "one-sided" doesn't even begin to describe this debate.
That would be an incredibly stupid and unequivocally false thing to suggest because the odds are actually stacked against Asians, and they must work harder than most other people to achieve the same thing. Asians have earned everything they've attained in this country. They deserve whatever success they've gotten, and for that, they receive undeserved discrimination and disrespect.
As an Asian, I don't agree with that. Many Asians emigrated from Asia with very little possessions and started their lives in Western countries in conditions as bad or worse than the poorest native born, including a significant language barrier and, yes, racism in their newly adopted homelands. Yet, by and large, they have built successful lives.
I'd describe the statement as incredibly accurate and unequivocally true.
so to get back to the grandparent post's question - why don't black people have this same mentality? What is it that's specific that's causing the disparity between asians and blacks?
2. No role model. Let's say you can somehow manage those hardships. But how do you know all this effort and education loans will be worth it? There are not many role models for African Americans in STEM so they are afraid to dream big. For Indians it's very easy, our culture (especially the Brahmin upper-middle class culture) has always had plenty of role models.
3. They never really paid the true price of getting out of poverty. Education in India and China is highly state sponsored, so all the quality education you got there was mostly tax paid, which enabled them to immigrate to US in the first place. If you give African Americans the same quality education fully sponsored by the state things will change for them too.
What about the generation of asians [0] that were from the beginning of the 19th century? They broke out of poverty, despite all the same disadvantages.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_Americans#:....
I can see the same happen in my ancestry too. The ones who migrated back in 1900s or during the wars never made it big while the educated ones who went there after 50s are doing well.
I would like to see if a Chamaar from Punjab was able to go to US before 1960s and able to become a land owner.
The phenomenon is larger than race, although it may be involved in any given instance or manifestation. It is a shared cliche for successful professionals hailing from both inner city to suburbs and dying small town Midwest that they never want to return to. That 'they're ones of the ones who made it out of that (shit/hell)hole', along with a disgust at its inhabitants or melancholy resignation that they are stuck in dysfunction, along with optional lingering resentment over mistreatment by the local crab-bucket.
I'm not sure anyone has an answer for how to solve those issues. A hypothetical solution probably wouldn't be very popular even if it isn't anything morally or ethically uncomfortable just from how 'counter-intutive' it would have to be.
Reverse racism, as it were?
> What about suggesting whites are (hypothetically) over-represented because they've made attaining education a priority?
Well, first they'd need to be over-represented ;).
> Forgive me for noticing, but "one-sided" doesn't even begin to describe this debate.
On the contrary, there seems to be a bazillion sides to this whole discussion.
Not at all - behold, an entire article complaining about too many whites on Harvard [1], despite being the most under-represented group [2].
[1] https://slate.com/business/2019/09/harvard-admissions-affirm...
edit: we joked that the progression of generations went: immigrant maid/janitor -> engineer/nurse/lab tech -> doctor/lawyer -> artist/unemployed philosopher
I thought the numbers were a lot more worrying.
STEM (or similar endeavors) are no such thing and never will be. Progress in these fields require the entirety of human virtue (and perhaps vice) - over and above that which can be strictly measured, categorized, in-calculated or trained. There is no good reason why any part of humanity should be under-represented in these undertakings.
There's nothing really stopping anyone from playing or enjoying a game, and as kids back in the day we used to play for fun on schoolyard courts. The problem is cultural; we as a culture have not really valued sports as recreation, but as either professional calling or consumer activity.
Trying to argue from the outlier really doesn't work as you said, but its also more of a cultural issue that we really don't value participation in sport over production of it.
So for you culture has no impact on an individual? Why should a particular field of human activities represent equally all the subsets of human groups?
Individuals are part of groups and groups have their inner dynamics and features.
Why are they more male chefs with 4 Michelin stars? Should there be an equal representation of women? No.
Because Whites don't face systematic discrimination in (or in the pipeline leading to) the whole host of fields where Blacks do, so taking a shot that is about as reliable as investing all your income in lottery tickets if you have the signs that you might be able to make it to shoot for a pro basketball career isn't as likely to make any kind of sense for Whites.
"Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete"
For those who may pass judgment based on the title and the inclusion of the word slave, I leave this NYT review from historian Warren Goldstein as a mark of quality. [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com./2006/07/23/books/review/23goldstein...
> During the NBA's 2016-2017 regular season, 66 percent of TV viewers were racial minorities, according to data from ratings provider Nielsen: Blacks made up 47 percent of the audience, Hispanics 11 percent and Asians 8 percent.
For STEM, or computer programming and math at least, it's far harder to know. Certainly there are very few black people in tech/math, at least at the higher levels.
Perhaps part of the problem is that empty virtue signaling (like banning the terms "master" and "slave") is easy, but actually doing the work that would really matter is hard. I spent a couple hours helping a black kid polish up for his Google interview (he made it).
That's something, but it will really take serious tutoring and a society wide scale to bridge the gap. And other socioeconomic factors might still prove overwhelming.
And for gods' sake, the whole "girls that code" thing needs to die right now. Can you imagine how a young black man would be affected by that?
so then by that logic, you can argue why there are so few whites in basketball must be that they aren't as tall and muscular.
Any decent sized ethnic group could dominate a profession if they wanted to.
What spoke to me the most was Chetty's statement that race always mattered no matter income, education, family, neighborhood. Go to 18:15 to learn more. Basically, while system and program improvements could result in lifting black boys/men up the ladder, the system was pushing against them. This is a profoundly difficult thing to labor against even in a systematic, data-informed, policy- and practice-driven way. But the failure to take a piecemeal approach may result in so few black people in STEM.
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Summary: Raj Chetty believes he may have found a way to reignite the American Dream. Using “Big Data,” Chetty says we can offer equality of opportunity to kids of disadvantaged backgrounds. The renowned Harvard Professor has received plaudits for his work in harnessing data to propose solutions to economic inequality. He sits down with Hari to explain his work.
it distinguishes between white (59.3), Asian (10.8), Black or African American (3.9), Hispanic or Latino (10.4), American Indian or Alaska Native (0.3) Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (0.1) and Temporary visa holder (9.3) for Engineering
Edit: and More than one race, unknown, or other (5.9), adds up to 100
Similarly to we Britons speaking of 'Europe' and particularly 'Europeans' with the 'continental' implied - and even that phrase not really making sense, not meaning the same as 'mainland'!
Many modern forms just say ‘check any that apply’, so you can check both white and Asian, for example.
I believe there are a number of reasons why there are so few African-Americans in STEM.
1. Many of us grew up in low-income households that don't have the same amount of resources to devote to education that higher-income households do. Many of us also grew up in households where the parents don't have college degrees. Roughly 70% of African-Americans are born to unmarried parents, and many African-Americans live in single-parent homes; being a single parent is very challenging. Many low-income housing areas are unfortunately crime-ridden. It takes a lot of determination for parents to raise their children under such circumstances.
2. Having a successful STEM career means being able to master technical subjects that require a considerable amount of time and focus to study, such as mathematics. Consider the type of mathematics and science preparation needed to enter a top-tier undergraduate STEM program. Now compare that to the education opportunities that are available at most American high schools, especially those located in the low-income neighborhoods that many African-American high schoolers attend. Without the influence of a really good teacher or mentor, or without the influence of a parent who has earned a college degree, how would a student learn the study skills that are necessary for obtaining a STEM degree? I'll give a personal anecdote: despite my perfect high school GPA (4.0 unweighted), my history of being in gifted programs, and having taken seven community college courses (including three computer science courses), the transition to attending Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a computer science major was a rough one for me because I didn't know how to study for rigorous university-level STEM courses. I basically skated through my entire pre-university experiences; I didn't know what it was like to actually have to sit down and truly study something that I wasn't already passionate about (I was able to teach myself programming and Japanese, but I found it difficult going through my physics textbooks). Despite this, I stuck with it at Cal Poly and ended up eking out a 3.0 GPA, which was just enough for me to enter a PhD program, though not my dream school of Carnegie Mellon. Unfortunately I knew of many students who either dropped out or switched to less demanding majors.
3. So, despite the odds, you end up with a freshly-minted STEM degree and it's time to take on the world! Well, the challenges aren't over yet. Imagine being the first in your family to have a white-collar job, as was the case with me. Who is going to give you advice about how corporate America works and how to succeed under that environment? Imagine being the only black person in your office, or sometimes at the company? Thankfully I grew up with a lot of immersion in various cultures and so I'm comfortable with being the only black person around, but that doesn't always mean that the people I work with are comfortable around me. I personally haven't experienced discrimination at the workplace, but I know other people who have. There are also non-work stresses; there's taking care of other family members, there's dealing with the police, there's dealing with dating, which I've found difficult in Silicon Valley. These challenges could mount up and have people think of alternatives.
I believe that any solution to addressing the shortage of black people in STEM will involve addressing all three issues above. Starting from #3 and working my way up to #1:
- We need to retain the black professionals in STEM that we already have by providing mentorship opportunities that will help us navigate our careers and our personal lives.
- For university students, we need to teach them how to study STEM and what it means to truly master a topic. Mastery of the foundations is important for research and developing technologies.
- Our high schools need to be more rigorous. By the time a high school student graduates, the student should know how to study at the college level, and the student should be able to be competent in a wide field of subjects, not only STEM, but also English, history, economics, government, and a foreign language. Middle school and elementary school should also be made more rigorous in order to prepare students for high school. Ideally the level of competence of a high school graduate should be equivalent to an associate's degree. Alan Kay once quoted an English woman who said, "[y]ou Americans have the best high school education in the world -- what a pity you have to go to college to get it!"
- Finally, we need to address the social problems mentioned in #1, though unfortunately I don't have specific solutions regarding these problems.
Here are some of his "controversial" views:
1. Reduce the incentive to destroy the family unit by providing large benefits to single parents
2. School choice
For the first one, even the leftist economists don't dispute the distortions caused by these transfers. As for point 2, they'll always shriek about things even though it makes sense to tie the child to the money and not the money to the school. Parents will always suss out the better option and will send their child to a better school.
criminal record.
in the US you can discriminate against employees who have any sort of criminal record. I've served jailtime for possession of cannabis, so that automatically rules me out for a lot of white-collar jobs. Black people tend to get the brunt of policing, and hold disproportionately high rates of misdemeanor and felony charges and longer sentences. I got 3 years for my conviction, but i know a black machinist who served 8 and a parole for an almost identical charge.
We call them "correctional facilities" but continue to discriminate in housing and employment for anyone who's been 'corrected' in one...sort of a standing biblical retribution.
Diesel mechanic isn’t a bad career (my dad is an elevator mechanic and I still sometimes think I should have just done that), grass is always greener etc
I've heard of a lot of guys with much bigger drug charges breaking into the field. I was reading a thread a few weeks ago, where one person basically said as long as it isn't something like a serious financial crime or computer crime they'd be willing to hire someone.
Sorry if I ask, but how much? Three years seems an awful lot of time.
Second, for how long can companies access this kind of record? Isn't it unacceptable to discriminate candidates based on something that has nothing to do with the qualification for a job?
The question in itself wasn't out of idle curiosity but because the sentencing seems disproportionate. I wanted to double check this before launching in a tirade against the US justice :)
Until you get your record expunged, assuming you can (some states, e.g. Washington, make that impossible). It's not like a credit report there's no 7 year filter on what shows up in a background check.
> Isn't it unacceptable to discriminate candidates based on something that has nothing to do with the qualification for a job?
Unacceptable, or illegal? It's [mostly] only illegal to discriminate against a protected class, everything else is fair game. Whether it is acceptable is an opinion.
that same felony will also basically permaban you from any educational loans, or most other loans fwiw. Check cashing is now your friend.
Also not all black people, but the fact that black people make up 14% of america but 40% of the prison population is not helping the prospects for a more diverse STEM.
Literally not a single one of them has a trust fund.
I know probably about a dozen people with trust funds. None of them got anything past a Masters (but most did actually go for the masters).
Obviously this is anecdotal, but in my experience your assertion is not true. If you have stats to back it up though I'd be happy to see them.
I think it’s a pipeline problem. How many Blacks are graduating from top schools in STEM? I didn’t graduate from a top school at all. But that was back in the mid 90s and by choice. I just needed a degree. I knew I could get a job and be competitive with anyone being self taught in both C and a variety of assembly languages.
I just got a job at Amazon under AWS Professional Services. I got a customer facing role as a Black guy. If there were going to be discrimination, that would be where it would be. Because of Covid, the interview was completely virtual. I’m coming from a long 25 year career of working for mostly small companies that no one has ever heard of. All of my AWS experience came from a company with less than 50 people.
I can honestly say that I don’t think I have ever been discriminated against in hiring. I have had maybe 3 rejections in 25 years, plenty of interviews and since I only use recruiters, my resume doesn’t go through the ATS black hole.
Anyone who studied for the AWS Architect Associate could pass it.
Of course, I did have a resume that showed a lot of real world experience with AWS in particular and leading technical projects in general -thanks to working at small companies.
I wouldn’t make it past the first 10 minutes of an algorithm style interview for a software dev position at $BigTech at this point in my life. I knew my way in would be through the consulting department.
I did nothing special to prepare to work for Amazon. I just did my job, gained experience, and made sure I could answer soft skill questions based on the “Leadership Principles”.
I wasn’t even thinking about working at Amazon pre-Covid before my company had across the board pay cuts. My company made the announcement, the next day a recruiter from Amazon emailed me and I thought “Why Not?” They asked me to put in an application. I did it and a month and a half later I had an offer.
I definitely didn’t spend months “grinding leetCode” like the fresh college grads over at r/cscareerquestions.
I know in some STEM fields (not all in STEM is CS), you have MUCH MUCH higher chances to land a good job at a big company if you are female. But being female in medicine or law buys you nothing since there is no imbalance.
1. Mostly it is how much people like you and how much they share with you.
2. 1st class people hire 1st class people, 2nd class people hire 3rd class people
3. Being rejected tells nothing about you. The guy they hired tells a lot about the company.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/12/six-years-into-diversity-rep...
By the way the facebook data is only from 2014 to 2019. The headline is misleading when you only look at facebook.
I know some of the first Black software engineers at Facebook and none of them have kids (they're early 30s). The rest of it is true, people are discouraged both by bias in interviews and internal promotion/politics.