全球智库信息集成服务系统

We analyze race and gender trends in the Silicon Valley technology industry from 1980 to 2015, with a focus on computer science. In the technology industry, there has been a rapid growth of Asians among professionals and, to a lesser extent, among managers, coincident with a decrease in the proportion of Whites, particularly White females. There continues to be low participation of Hispanics and Blacks, especially Black females. These race trends are even more salient among programmers; in addition, we document a stable or increasing gender gap across all races in the programmer labor force and in computer science higher education. However, these demographic shifts are not always consistent with either a pipeline argument that there are insufficient supplies of potential underrepresented programmers or a wage difference explanation. Findings suggest that policies to increase the number of programmers in underrepresented groups should differ by race and gender groups.