In a bid to hit a 50-50 gender ratio in its technical entry-level workforce, General Electric (GE) has announced plans to hire about 5,000 more women in STEM positions by 2020.
The company currently has about 15,000 in those roles, according to Linda Boff, GE’s chief marketing officer, in an interview with AdWeek Wednesday.
“The program will significantly increase the representation of women in its engineering, manufacturing, IT and product management roles —a strategy necessary to inject urgency into addressing ongoing gender imbalance in technical fields and fully transform into a digital industrial company,” the company revealed in a blog post.
GE is also hoping to hit a 50-50 ratio in its technical leadership program, multi-year training courses that are expected to produce executives and leaders. So it makes sense the company also released a video featuring Millie Dresselhaus, a physics and engineering professor who won a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
https://youtu.be/sQ6_fOX7ITQ
According to a white paper published by GE, companies would have to hire roughly 2 million women in engineering and computing jobs over the next decade to fill the gender gap in STEM jobs.
This story has been updated to reflect additional data regarding GE’s technical leadership program.