Unfortunately the recent news that women and minorities are critically underrepresented in IT is not a surprise.
The Information Technology Association of America’s latest study shows that the percentage of women in IT has dropped from 41% in 1996 to 32% in 2004. The ITAA attributes that to “the shrinking number of administrative jobs in the tech industry.”
We’d love to know what they classify as “administrative.” That sounds vaguely “9-to-5”-ish to us.
Hispanics were the most underrepresented group in IT, comprising 6.4% of the tech work force, which amazingly was up from 5.3% in 1996. African-Americans were underrepresented in the tech industry by 22% when compared with their numbers in the overall U.S. work force. No word on what their exact percentage in IT is.
The ITAA says the declining percentages and under-representations don’t bode well for the U.S. compared with – you guessed it – China and India, “where universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of science and engineering students per year – in some cases with nearly equal numbers of women and men.”
Via My Way News
