Hispanics in Data Science 
Published: 2020-07-19 20:31:20

I have 20 years of experience working in Finance related roles such as Investment Accounting, Equity Trading, and Investment Analysis. During those years, I worked at different companies, attended many meetings and many large conferences. The one constant that I have seen, is that Finance in the US and Europe is dominated by White men. Women are few but there are certain roles that where they are well represented, mostly in sales and marketing. Black and Hispanic are more rare, particularly Black men. Now that I am doing a Masters in Quantitative Methods for potentially a career change, I wondered if Data Science is a White dominated field, so I decided to do some research on this. 

Now, women naturally are just over 50% of the population, while Hispanics are 17% and Blacks are 13%, so combined Black and Hispanics are 30% of the population. Of course, if I go to a conference, Women and Blacks are easy to spot, whereas some of us Hispanics tend to blend in better than others. 

According to one website, in Technology overall, about 33% of workers are female and 17% are Black and Hispanic which is not encouraging. However, I estimate that these numbers are significantly higher than in Finance, so that’s good. According to the same website, Tech leadership is 83% White, so some of the diversity of the lower ranks disappears at the top level. Another website estimates that Women hold only about 26% of data job or about half of the overall population percent, so this appears to be a significant underrepresentation. 

Now, Hispanics (and Blacks) make up a small proportion of workers in Science and Engineering occupations than of the US population as a whole, only 6% versus being 17% of the population. Hispanics constitute large share of those employed as social workers or health technologists or technicians, but they hold small percentages of jobs in computer and math scientists (5%) and physical and related scientists (5%). The chart below comes from the National Science Foundation website (www.nsf.gov) and is 5 years old but likely the percentages have not changed much. 

 


A more recent report issued in 2020* (a collaboration of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and the Student Research Foundation) has the following to say: 

“Hispanics are one in four U.S. students (25%) – second only to Whites (51%). Hispanic adults, historically underrepresented in STEM, continue to be an underutilized talent pool. They currently comprise 17% of the workforce overall but merely 8% of the STEM workforce.”

The report also notes that Hispanic Women represent about 7% of the total population but they hold less than 2% of STEM jobs.

*https://www.studentresearchfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Hispanics_STEM_Report_Final-1.pdf

The encouraging thing is that the percent of Science and Engineering degrees earned by Hispanics has been increasing, however Hispanics still lag (as a percent of the population). For instance, Mathematics and Statistics degrees earned by Hispanics have increased from 4% to 8% in a 20-year period, so a positive change but we are still behind where we could be. 


 

One thing that needs to improve for Hispanics (and Blacks) to increase in getting STEM degrees, is for high school students to have access to advanced science and math courses. One study noted that Black/Hispanics students lacked access to high-level science and math courses. They saw that Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, and Algebra 2 courses where not frequently offered in areas with large percent of minorities. So we need to make sure that students have access to these. 

Since many Hispanic students do not come from families with STEM knowledge, it makes it harder for students to complete homework and compete with students that have access to tutors. So, we could establish a network of mentors to help and guide these young kids. Also, it may be feasible to establish free after school tutoring programs. 

Data, computers, programming, science, all these are the future and if we want our people to have bright futures, things must start to change and improve things now.