My experience over about 30 years is that 90% of engineers I’ve seen, including applicants, are male and 60% are Asian. I’d estimate I’ve encountered about 5,000 engineers. I wasn’t tallying so this includes whatever bias I have as a North American tech worker.
But most engineers are not white as far as I’ve experienced.
Great point! In addition, race and ethnicity are different dimensions, so with 6% of developers as Hispanic/Latino, if you're interested in the white non-Hispanic population, that's probably around 52% given about half of Hispanics identify as white.
Those are "white-adjacent". They're the glitch in the woke matrix.
They're minorities, non-white, yet they perform. Outperform even. This suggests that merit works no matter your background which breaks identity politics.
Hence, successful minorities project "whiteness". This includes awful behavior like punctuality and rationalism.
One thing's for sure though, nobody in tech really cares about your race or sexual orientation, they care about your results.
Sure there might be some bias against/for some groups, but everyone knows there's genuses in India and white caucasian flops so they give everyone equal opportunity.
Only exception is for like legal reasons it might be easier to hire some French random low-tier programming over a Russian/Irani genius but that's due to sanctions, but if those same Russian/Irani guys held a western european passport they would gladly just hire them outright.
Source: Venezuelan (sanctions) who is also a holder of a European passport (all sorts of doors just open just because I hold this 2nd nationality out of sheer luck, and you know Venezuelans aren't extremist either).
Eh, that isn't quite true because determining the quality of the "result" is biased by our opinion of its author and, equally important, how they present their results. Race and sexual orientation impact your speech patterns and habits which you very much are judged on.
Additionally, when a woman works with a man on something often the woman's contribution is assumed to be less than the man's contribution if they're listed as co-authors - I would be very surprised if this weren't the case beyond academia but also in artifacts like design docs.
But most engineers are not white as far as I’ve experienced.