Electrons Are Color Blind
Musings on race, opportunity, and our profession
by Lee H. Goldberg, Senior Technical Editor, ChipCenter

My mother gave my daughter, Anwyn, her first tool kit for Chanukah. I'm not talking about the cheesy little plastic sets that end up breaking within five minutes after they're opened. Nope, at five years of age, the kid has a small, but very functional collection of pliers, wrenches, screwdrivers, and other implements of destruction that any grownup would covet. Actually, I gave my mom the idea for the small tackle box full of tools - in part to keep her out of my own tool box, which had become one of her favorite toys, and also because I really need the extra help around the house.

A Geek In Training

Besides demonstrating uncanny abilities with a pair of ChanneLocks, she's really fascinated by the way things work. Whether it's the functions on my new cell phone, or the float valve in the toilet, she's got to tinker with everything until she knows just what it does, and how it works. While I don't want to push her, I really think she'd make a great engineer. We've already started saving up for MIT, I but also realize that she's going to have to overcome an extra pair of obstacles in her engineering career path because she's both female and African-American.

Since Catherine and I adopted Anwyn five years ago, we've become increasingly aware of many things that us melanin-challenged pink folk don't usually pay attention to. Besides stuff like the awful stereotypes African-American people in media are still struggling against, and the disproportionate number of Blacks holding down lower-paying service-sector jobs, I've really become sensitive to how darned few black, or Hispanic engineers I run into in my travels. While I've always known a few engineers of color throughout my 25 years in electronics, their relative proportion to the rest of the workforce does not seem to have changed much over time - and lately I've been wondering why.

Our profession has done a great job of diversifying the workforce in many respects, with a substantial part of our ranks now filled by Chinese, Indians, Koreans, and other people of Asian origin. No doubt, all of us have benefited from a more "colorful" workplace, and yet, it's still something of a novelty to see a Black or Hispanic face in the seas of cubicles in the companies I report on, let alone in the in the more plushly carpeted halls of upper management. In a field like ours which prides itself on its meritocratic culture, I find it even more surprising that I can only call to mind a handful of African-Americans like Everett Brooks of Adtran, and David Tarver, founder of TAS, (let alone a black woman!) to point to as role models for my daughter.

Since African-Americans make up a bit under 14%⁽¹⁾ of the population of the United States, and Hispanics another 11.5%⁽²⁾, I find it kind of weird to see most (not all) electronics companies with more people of color on their small janitorial staff than in the rest of the enterprise. And even in the companies that more closely reflect the demographics of our nation, their engineering department is usually still almost devoid of people who share my daughter's racial heritage.

I don't claim to have all the right answers, or perhaps even the right questions. For one thing, I've asked myself if the narrow slice of the industry is really representative of the demographics as a whole. I also wondered if the limited geography I usually travel in (Silicon Valley, Austin/Dallas, Atlanta, Boston, and Ottawa) means that I'm missing parts of the country with a heavier percentage of "geeks of color".

A Statistical View

To get a quantitative handle on the situation, I took a little time to ask some people who have more experience in these matters. My first stop was the National Action Council on Minorities in Engineering (NACME) where I learned that there has been lots of progress in the past 30 years. The number of African-American engineering students (for all professions) graduating each year has steadily grown from a bit over 500 in 1971, to over 3100 in 2000⁽³⁾. Hispanics have enjoyed similar success, with their ranks swelling from barely 100-200 graduates to over 3100 a year in the same period⁽³⁾.

The downside to this is that the total represents the new minority entrants into all the engineering professions (chemical, electrical, mechanical, computer science, civil, etc.). I could not find a full breakdown of how many people of color are graduation as electrical engineers, but even my optimistic guess of 20-25% would place the total number at 1300 to 1600 Black and Hispanic people entering our profession each year. Between this, and the fact that the graduation numbers seem to have been leveling off over the past 2-3 years (measuring only slight increases), it seems to me as though my daughter will still be one of only a few "chocolate chips in the cookie" if she chooses a career in any branch of engineering.

What Does It Mean?

I was not quite sure what all these statistics meant to the average Joe or Jane, so I turned to the National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE) for their perspective. I asked Anisha Zimmerman, a representative in NBSE's public affairs office, about the apparent shortage of black electrical engineers. She explained that NSBE's members are not reporting any significant level of job discrimination within the industry these days (a welcome piece of news), and that they were now wrestling with several other major social issues that they feel are limiting entry into in engineering careers.

According to the NSBE, the biggest challenge they face is getting African-Americans to look at engineering as a viable profession at an early enough age to be properly equipped to meet the challenges of a technical curriculum. To meet this challenge, NSBE has developed a number of really cool programs to get kids interested, and excited about all things geek-y. Since math skills are essential to engineering, NSBE organizes an annual "Tri-Mathalon", a sort of math Olympics, run in a lively "Jeaopardy-Style" format, that develops and recognizes whiz-kids at local, regional, and national levels.

The NSBE also runs leadership preparedness programs to give high-schoolers about to enter college an edge on the technical and social skills they'll need to succeed. In recent years, they have also recognized that kids must often be reached earlier than high school to make a difference, and have busied themselves in rolling out similar programs for grade-schoolers. If my daughter continues to display interest in a technical career, I'm going to be sure to hook her up with one or more of these activities, as well as the excellent mentoring program that NSBE runs.

I'm Still Confused

While much of what I heard made sense, I am still confused. Even given the small number of Black engineers in the field, my intuition still says that I should be seeing more of them than I do in my travels throughout the networking industry. One colleague who lives in the Raleigh-Durham technical triangle reports that he sees a much higher percentage number of Black professionals, including engineers there, and in the Atlanta metro region, than nearly anywhere else he travels. I was not sure what to do with this single data point, so I asked a number of Human Resource professionals I know in Silicon Valley what they made of it.

One of the most thoughtful analyses came from my sister-in-law, Susan O'Brien, who, among other things was the former VP of H.R. at Lycos. She observed that throughout her career, the companies in Silicon Valley she worked for were eager to recruit minorities into their workforces, but had problems convincing them to move from their East Coast roots in Chicago, Boston and Atlanta where they had lived and gone to school. Susan also said that once they came to work, many Black engineers and technical professionals had difficulty adjusting to an environment where they might be one of two or three people in an organization.

Perhaps even more difficult for them, was no African American peer group to relate to socially either on the job or after work. From the conversations she had with them, it seems that many of her recruits felt like pioneers in a strange wilderness, where little, if anything in the Silicon Valley culture made them feel welcome or at home.

While I suspect that Susan's experiences were only one part of a much larger puzzle, I suspect that what she saw was at least a contributing factor to the strange demographics I see in my slice of the industry. I'm not sure what, other than applying patience, persistence, and understanding to the situation, can be done to make tech centers like San Jose, Dallas, and San Diego more welcoming of minority professionals, but I am hopeful that over time things can, and will improve.

So, I find myself back at the beginning, asking myself if the world will have welcome my bright and talented African-American she-geek when she grows up, and am presented with a few answers and many more questions. While her career decision still lies over a decade away, I'd really welcome any experiences, either good or bad, that readers wish to share with me about being a minority engineer.

And with all the pondering I've done, I've not even begun to think about how female engineers are faring these days. But it's late, and those issues will have to wait for another column. For now, I'll try to put off any more worrying for another day, and go read Anwyn her bedtime story. It's the best hour of my whole day. Good night, and good wishes to parents of little geeks everywhere.

Write me at lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.

Resources

National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE)
National Action Council on Minorities in Engineering (NACME)
NACME's collection of useful links for minority engineers
Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers
Society of Mexican American Engineers and Scientists
Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS)
United States Census Bureau
Women In Technology International
Society of Women Engineers

References

(1) MSNBC - Aug 14, 2001
(2) U.S. Census Bureau - June 1, 1999
(3) NACME Annual Report - 2001

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