Black Diversity in IT and Computer Science
If you haven’t had a chance to read Why Black Nerds are Unpopular by David Adewumi, you should run over there right now. It gives an interesting cultural explanation for why the author believes we don’t see many African Americans in IT / Computer Science. It’s the inspiration for this post, a sort of state of the world of black diversity in IT. In his article, David writes how few of his black friends are “nerds:”
I would say, as a young black male, there is a strong inverse correlation between being a nerd and black, and being popular. I’ve seen many black friends who are fairly intelligent that were mediocre students in high school, and either failed out or were equally mediocre at the University level. Why? Popularity is, as Paul mentions, often times a choice of priorities — some sacrifice intelligence for popularity — and for blacks, this probably happens for 9 out of every 10.
I would go so far as to say that the lack of black nerds is probably a cause for major concern, but within the scope of this writing, possibly too large a problem to properly address, although certainly an interesting one.
After some Googling, I was able to find data from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Science and Engineering Degrees, by Race/Ethnicity of Recipients: 1995-2004, with information about degree recipients partitioned by self-identified race:
In 2004, 5,934 black students out of 57,405 total (10.33%) received undergraduate degrees in computer science. Overall, among all degrees, 4.84% of black students chose a degree in Computer Science as opposed to just 3.15% of white students. I don’t have enough personal or intellectual background to discuss these figures, but to my uninformed eye, they look quite promising. More blacks (by percentage) are choosing to study Computer Science than whites (our baseline majority in the US). And, while at 8.4% black undergraduate students feel underrepresented, the news indicates graduation rates are improving.
America needs to moving forward on providing excellent education to all Americans, not just the privileged majority. Perhaps our next President–who looks to be Barack Obama–will be tougher on education than his “no child left behind” predecessor and we’ll see these numbers get even better.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 7:44 pm and is tagged with national science foundation, inverse correlation, graduation rates, race ethnicity, degree recipients, intellectual background, black students, googling, undergraduate degrees, nerds, computer science, african americans, undergraduate students, nerd, sacrifice, priorities, diversity, inspiration, popularity, scope. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on July 9th, 2008 at 1:15 am
It’s a bit disheartening that I can’t think of any prominent blacks in tech (besides someone like John Thompson (CEO of Symantec), who doesn’t have a technical background). I hope to fix that one day =)