Green Desert: Clean-tech sector has to broaden talent pool
K Kaufmann
The Desert Sun
Like many people today, I wake up each morning faced with an existential dilemma.
Do I or do I not grab my cell phone for a quick email and Twitter check to make sure I haven't missed any overnight or early-breaking events? It's an exercise I always think will only take a moment or two but usually ends up gluing me to the small screen for 10-15 minutes.
Wednesday, I succumbed, but in this case, I actually had a tweet I needed to know about — from the Department of Energy announcing the imminent live stream of a White House conference on minorities in energy. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz was scheduled to kick off the proceedings, so I was at my laptop, tea mug in hand, in 10 minutes.
The appalling lack of minorities and women in clean tech is no secret, as anyone who has ever been to an industry conference can tell you. White men still predominate, and the doors are only beginning to open to other ethnic groups. Getting 20 percent women speakers on the program for this year's Southern California Energy Summit, held last month in Palm Springs, required a special effort. Minority speakers were even scarcer.
Talking in bullet points, like the MIT professor he is, Moniz set out the numbers underlying the problem and why it leaves the country at a disadvantage in the current global competition in clean-tech markets.
While they comprise 24 percent of the U.S. population, blacks and Latinos make up only 9 percent of our scientists and engineers, he said. Women and minorities account for 70 percent of college students, but hold only 45 percent of undergraduate degrees in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, the core clean-tech disciplines commonly referred to as STEM.
"We want to be a huge player in emerging low-carbon markets," Moniz said. "We are not using all our talent today. This is about competition."
Camsie McAdams, a senior advisor on STEM education at the Department of Education, recalled the not-so-subtle cues she received as one of the pioneering women in a college engineering program.
"They didn't take urinals out of the female dorms," she said. "We made them into planters."
Students need support and early opportunities, before their senior year, to connect with research and job opportunities, McAdams said. She and other speakers on a panel on STEM education also repeatedly invoked the concept of career pathways that has made the Coachella Valley a national model in tying K-12 curricula to 2- and 4-year college programs and jobs, with many students in the program low-income and Latino.
Dimitri Kusnezov, a senior advisor at the Department of Energy, took the discussion a step further by calling for closer ties between schools, especially community colleges, and federal research labs.
"The DOE is built around a core of national labs and has a need for a strong and developing STEM workforce," he said. "Two-year colleges won't be research universities, yet the commonality of the schools is their reach into the community. Engaging schools large and small, tying them to labs, developing interest and programs engrained in the road maps of schools, STEM can provide sustainable growth of schools."
The goal, he said, should be to create a "line of sight" for students to see job opportunities early.
The valley already has a link to the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado through the Coachella Valley iHub, our green business incubator, which has access to all the cutting-edge technology developed at the lab and ready for commercialization.
The bigger challenge lies in breaking through deeply engrained biases among the nation's large and mid-sized companies, said Wayne Watson, president of Chicago State University. While some, such as Pacific Gas & Electric, have model recruiting and training programs reaching out to minority communities, others don't try, he said during a panel on economic development and jobs.
"Lack of will has cost companies billions of dollars," Watson said, "(They) want to take that hit, not promote that young man or woman in an executive job. They'd rather be gender-biased and take that loss. This can't be acceptable."
Echoing Moniz, Robert Gee, president of the energy consulting firm Gee Strategies Group, said the cost could be the loss of the United States' position as the world's innovation leader.
"If we don't do it in the U.S., make the workforce reflect the population, it will migrate overseas," he said.