To understand Google’s lack of gender diversity, go to the source

At the start of Stanford’s fall term a few years ago I received a text from my son in a computer science class. Looks like the usual mix of students, he reported. Lots of white guys with beards and Asian males.

No females at all? I responded. A handful, he said, but then this was not a small class.

When a Google employee’s memo about diversity and women’s alleged aptitude for jobs in the tech industry got him fired a few weeks ago, most of the news reports were fairly specific about what he said and what his critics, including CEO Sundar Pichai, found objectionable. But the reports often did a pitiful job in explaining why Google and other tech giants find themselves with such male-heavy work forces.

And the news commentators were even worse. Many opined sententiously on the importance of diversity as if Google wasn’t aware of it and wasn’t spending a fortune to find female software engineers, while suggesting the tech industry as a whole nurtures a fratstyle or nerd-style culture of exclusion and that sexism alone is to blame for the gender disparity.

Sexism — and outright sexual misconduct — obviously exists in Silicon Valley, and the sheer dominance of men may indeed produce a culture that in subtle respects, perhaps unappreciated by its participants, is off-putting to some women. But the flip side to this reality is often neglected: that the average highly educated, mild-mannered male tech engineer would probably welcome more women in the work place. My son’s text was anything but a fist pump.

Cutting-edge tech companies already boast work forces that are astonishingly diverse in many respects — and much more diverse than what most Americans have ever experienced — with engineers from a staggering number of nationalities rubbing shoulders without notable friction. The idea that these same firms would bridle at the idea of employing more qualified women is not credible.

But here’s a problem they have to deal with, which you wouldn’t have seen in most media coverage: According to the report “Generation CS” from the authoritative Computing Research Association, female students earned just 16 percent of computer science (CS) bachelor’s degrees in 2015. And incredibly, that percentage was up from “a low point of just above 11 percent in 2009.”

There’s a pipeline problem, in other words, and it may be bigger than in any other well-paying field. Indeed, it’s worse than it was a generation ago. In 1984, more than a third of CS majors were women.

Now the good news is you don’t have to major in computer science to find a job in the tech industry. As the MIT Technology Review reported recently, “Among graduates with degrees in physics, math, statistics, or electrical engineering, as many as 20 percent now work in computing-based fields. At least 10 percent of people who majored in aerospace engineering, astronomy, biomedical engineering, or general engineering have made the same migration.”

Still, the most direct route remains CS, where the disparity in gender enrollment is a chasm.

Rather than bray at tech companies as if they were run by neanderthals, maybe critics should swivel their attention to the education system, and particularly the K-12 grades where girls might be exposed to possible career paths in tech before they gravitate in other directions. Joanna Bruno, science content specialist at the Colorado De- of Education, told me recently that this is precisely what several initiatives in the state, some quite new, are seeking to do — and especially in collaboration with the state’s growing tech industry.

Like a lot of states, Bruno said, Colorado is playing catch-up regarding the importance of computer science, but lawmakers in the past two years have begun to act. They’ve loosened restrictions so districts can partner with community colleges and businesses to provide CS, approved grants to support CS teachers and programs, and said districts could allow CS to count toward math or science requirements.

Andy Kessler, who comments on technology and markets for The Wall Street Journal, recently argued that states should even “allow computer languages to count as foreign languages” for high school credit, given how technology is going to make universal translation available to everyone. I’m not quite in his camp, but he did offer arguments that can’t be dismissed out of hand.

No doubt colleges could do more to broaden CS’S appeal, too. Harvey Mudd and Carnegie Mellon seem to have succeeded in that regard, but they remain a rarity.

As we wait for reforms to take effect, we should also try to remember, even in this diversity-obsessed age, that career choices are not usually going to break down evenly along gender or ethnicity lines no matter how equal the opportunity. And that’s hardly a social tragedy. The freedom to be a computer engineer, after all, also implies the freedom to be something else.

Vincent Carroll is a former Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor.