At my company (an engineering services company), we about 100 technical employees. How many are black? 2. How many women engineers? 4.
But this isn't because of any discrimination in hiring, at least at our company. According to the National Action Council on Minorities in Engineering, only about 5% of engineering bachelor's degrees are awarded to African-Americans despite being about 12% of the population. That might be somewhat understandable given the economic class many African-Americans come from, but more on that later. It's worse when you consider the state of women in engineering, where less than 15% of BSxEs are women, despite being a majority of the general population. And generally speaking, those numbers can't even be explains by economic class.
Engineering is one of the few reasonably accessible professional occupations that pays good-excellent salaries. Yet, it is dominated by white (and to a lesser extent, Asian) men. This actively works against efforts to close wage gaps for most racial minorities and women.
Many, if not most, African-Americans don't get the secondary education they need to be successful as engineering students, and few of them have anything like a real-life role model. And women, while quite often well-prepared academically, are sometimes put off by the sausage fest that is most engineering programs in this country, and if they do run into trouble, are encouraged to pursue a less academically challenging career path, whereas men are often encouraged to simply buckle down and work harder.
We need more and better supported programs to help make technical careers accessible to a broader range of students, and we need to improve the quality of technical education of schools more frequently attended by economically disadvantaged students. Even when they get a degree from an accredited university, the quality of the education is often iffy, in my experience.
For the record, I'm a white male engineer.
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