Why aren't there more black engineers?

In an attempt to answer why black engineers are so rare in Silicon Valley (they account for 2 percent of the engineers there at most), the International Business Times (IBT) examined the issue.

Black Americans with advanced engineering degrees exist -- IBT reported that African-Americans earned 4.4 percent of master’s degrees in engineering and 3.6 percent of engineering Ph.D.s in 2014, which equals a pool of about 5,000 black engineers that private industry can draw from each year, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.

There are a couple of reasons for the disparity, the report argued, the first being that Silicon Valley draws heavily from some schools, but ignores graduates of others, reducing an already relatively small pool of black engineers. The other reason, the article suggests, is that other industries, like oil and gas, are more welcoming for black engineers.

A Fast Company report suggested that young black students lack black engineer role models to pull them into the field.