Surely it does, a culture that makes people feel unwelcome and doesn’t invest in helping them thrive in an environment where they are in the minority definitely plays a role.
It’s hard to be the only one in a class/company/group that looks like you. That’s a big obstacle and we should be more supportive of those who overcome it.
Also, while Asians make up a large portion of line engineer positions, they make up a smaller fraction of leadership positions. That’s troubling to me as well.
See leadership.
30% Asian (6% us pop) 60% white (65% us pop)
Asians widely over represented.
Should we give less jobs to Asians and more to blacks and Hispanics?
This kind of points to socioeconomic and educational opportunities in early life. Blacks come from poorer backgrounds etc. But why bring race into it? Why not lift up people from poorer backgrounds of all races, instead of racist affirmative action policies.
These diversity reports are basically saying: we need to make our employees less racist and sexist when hiring.
Lift up by better primary education? Lift up by more outreach to get more poorer people into computing as young adults? Or lift up by having hiring quotas for people whose family income was provably bottom quartile for at least 5 years in their childhood?
Surely someone has studied this though. “Why did you not choose comp sci major?”
All the answers are there. The fact we don’t hear about it is probably because it doesn’t fit the narrative that intersectionalism wants to tell.
Last time I went to research the history of why women were dominant in tech and then then minority, it was nothing to do with sexism surprise, surprise.
Exposure to computers at a young age is everything.
I will do some more research though and come back <- the best part about HN conversations for me.
1. https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/university-of-califo...
2. https://www.wired.com/story/five-years-tech-diversity-report...