By Andrew Eicher | 13 February 2017
CNS NEWS — 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. […]
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