U.S. News and World Report’s STEM Solutions National Leadership Conference is addressing the challenge of how to get more female and minority students interested in science.
This is the fourth year organizers brought education, business and political leaders together to figure out how to improve Science Technology Engineering and Math, or STEM, education. This year's conference kicked off Monday and is being held in San Diego at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. Diversity is the conference's theme.
Brian Kelly, editor and chief content officer of U.S. News and World Report, had tough questions about why the United States has such low numbers of women studying STEM subjects.
“I’ve seen numbers as high as 50 percent of the engineering students (who are women) in Mexico," Kelly said. "In the United States, it’s 20. So why is that? It’s not a gender problem, it’s a culture problem.”
Conquering the gender and ethnic bias in STEM education is a national problem and it leads to a lack of diversity in the professional world, Kelly said.
“Ninety percent of the people running the companies, making all of the technology for society, are white males or Asians,” Kelly said. "It’s not that there are not very qualified people, there aren't enough of them.”
In the near future the workforce will be led by Latinos, according to Kelly.
“Particularly the Hispanic population, that’s where the labor pool is,” Kelly said. “So if you look backwards and there aren’t many ninth grade Hispanic kids interested in STEM, in eight years that’s the labor pool for the Intels and the Qualcomms.”
Kelly said at the end of the day it’s about jobs, and if American students aren’t prepared for STEM jobs, he’s sure young people in China and India are.
