In this episode of Work in Progress, Katy Knight, executive director and president of Siegel Family Endowment, and Allison Scott, CEO of Kapor Foundation, discuss the underrepresentation of women and people of color in the high-tech jobs and what to do about it.

High-tech jobs include software engineering, data science, and other technical roles, but it’s not just the pure tech companies that are hiring. Companies across all industries – banking, health care, education, manufacturing, and others – are in need of workers with good tech skills.

Data shows that Blacks, Hispanics, and women are underrepresented in those jobs.

Women make up less than 25% of the overall tech force, with Hispanics representing 9% and Blacks making up 7%. This lack of diversity is even worse at the highest levels of tech.

Barriers to entry and advancement in tech careers include biases in hiring and promotion, lack of mentorship and social capital, and the need for more visibility of non-traditional tech career pathways.

Knight and Scott advocate addressing the problem early, well before someone is ready to join the workforce.

Here is some of what they tell me.

“The global we has not done a good enough job in articulating the variety of careers and the career pathways, both into what we think of as traditional big tech companies, but also startup companies. Also more traditional financial, the big financial industry, all of those different pathways that still, even medicine, I think we need to do a better job of creating visibility to a variety of different careers.

“One way that we like to articulate the problem is through a leaky tech pipeline metaphor. Only about 57% of high schools across the country offer computer science courses. So, you’re automatically restricting the ability of about half of our students to even pursue a course to potentially gain interest or the skills needed to go on to pursue computer science and higher education.”

“Given the explosion of interest in computer science and interest in tech jobs, the number of applicants to CS programs at undergraduate institutions has skyrocketed. So, as the barrier to entry there gets higher because everyone wants to do it, the admissions offices are looking for students who seem most adequately prepared.”

“Those students who are at the (K-12) schools where they have access to CS courses, who have taken AP CS, are going to be better candidates and better prepared, even when they are not necessarily any more skilled or smarter than a student who hasn’t had that access.

“It’s just with the pool so big and so deep, there are just certain impediments that come up because you’ve got to create some gates. The admissions officer can only do but so many things.”

In the podcast, we discuss efforts to address the low representation for women, Blacks, and Hispanics in high-tech jobs, including some of the programs Siegel Family Endowment and Kapor Foundation – as philanthropic organizations – are funding.

You can listen to the entire conversation here, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our podcasts on the Work in Progress YouTube channel.

Episode 342: Katy Knight, executive director & president, Siegel Family Endowment, and Allison Scott, CEO, Kapor Foundation
Host & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNation
Producer: Larry Buhl
Theme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4
Transcript: Download the transcript for this episode here
Work in Progress Podcast: Catch up on previous episodes here