I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar: GE Corporation Vows to Place 20,000 Women in Technical Roles By 2020
February 9, 2017
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
General Electric has announced a commitment to place 20,000 women in technical positions by 2020. Part of that goal is to hit a 50/50 gender representation in entry-level technical programs.
At present, GE employs 14,700 women, or about 18 percent of its technical workforce, in engineering, manufacturing, IT and product management.
“Unless we bring more women into technology and manufacturing, there will be a significant negative economic impact on the sector,” said Marco Annunziata, GE’s chief economist, in a statement. “This is a problem for business to actively address.”
Last week, GE announced that as part of its shift to become a “digital industrial company,” it had laid off anywhere from “several dozen” to 160 researcher at its GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York.
The company has been talking about the transition since at least 2015. As part of its evolution into a digital company, it is shifting the makeup of its research staff, investing heavily in software, robotics and artificial intelligence.
“With GE’s transformation to a digital industry company, we are evolving our research skill set to meet the needs of our customers and industries,” Todd Alhart, GE Global Research Spokesman said in a statement. “We are limiting research that is not central to GE’s strategy and investing in key areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. These changes are taking place across our global research centers. The shift is essential to keeping GE at the forefront of innovation and manufacturing into the future.”
GE’s internal diversity push is being directed by Vic Abate, the company’s chief technology officer, Bill Ruh, chief digital officer, and Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president of its accelerated leadership program. In addition, GE has created a chief technology officer advisory council to advise on its efforts. It is also expanding its “leading without bias” training and looking for ways to creating and maintaining an inclusive work environment.
As part of the push, it recently launched a TV ad asking, “What if female scientists were celebrities?” The ad focuses on 86-year-old Millie Dresselhaus. Dresselhaus was the first woman to win the U.S. National Medal of Science in Engineering. She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015. Her best-known work is on carbon science.
According to federal labor statistics, only 14 percent of engineers and 25 percent of IT workers are women, and only 17 percent of computer science graduates are women. In addressing this area, GE indicates that the problem isn’t just moral, but economic. The Boston Globe writes, “It pointed to figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a Europe-based economics agency, that suggest increasing female labor participation could boost a country’s economic output by five to 12 percent, and that companies with more diverse workforces delivery higher returns to investors.”
The company also released a white paper by Annunziata titled, “Engineering the Future: The Socio-Economic Case for Gender Equality.”
In it, Annunuziata writes, “The stakes are becoming greater as the pace of innovation accelerates and digital technologies transform the industrial world. Both advanced and emerging economies already suffer from a significant skills gap. Job positions remain unfilled, which is holding back the growth of key industries and slowing economic development. The U.S. alone will need to fill approximately 2 million engineering and computing jobs within the next decade.”