A few very bad assumptions there: 1) not all employees have CS degrees from the US, many are foreign 2) the graduation rate by "race" or "gender" in 2015 is not what is was in 2005, 1995, 1985 or 1975, and the any industry has many people who graduated a long time ago. Comparing current year demographics to the industry as a whole seems really off. 3) Due to historical economic status which is correlated with race, more of those that started off less well off tend to gravitate towards more stable companies.

None of these things mean that negative racial discrimination or stereotyping don't exist, just that we shouldn't expect numbers for a particular industry population to match the aggregate stats on who graduated last year.

> Assuming everyone who graduated with a CS degree from the US was hired at an equivalent then one would expect something closer to 7%-8%.

When I look at the data, I see that 2.5% of graduates are black. I'm looking at PhD, Master's or Bachelor's in CS in 2015.[1]

The totals exclude those with unknown ethnicity:

15 black CS PhDs out of 1442

110 black CS Master’s out of 8,923

425 black CS Bachelor’s out of 11,974

(15+110+425) / (1442+8923+11974) = ~0.0246

[1] 2015 Taulbee Survey, Computing Research Association

http://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2015-Taulbee-Surve...

EDIT: I believe one big source of the difference between our numbers is whether you count "Information" degrees as a CS degree. My number only looks at "Computer science" degrees, whereas your data looks at "Computer sciences" degrees.

The numbers are specifically in appendix 2-19(http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/append/c2/at02-19.xls)

2009 data:

(numbers are CS/All, CS% from all CS, CS% from all graduates in category)

Total graduating with a CS degree: 38,496/1,619,028(100%, ~2.37%)

Total White: 23,021/1,069,016(~60%, ~2.15%)

Total Black: 3,868/145,988(~10%, ~2.64%)

Total Asian/Pacific Islander: 2,894/105,246(7.5%, ~2.75%)

Total Hispanic: 2,999/137,746(7.80%, ~2.17%)

Interestingly, both Black and Asian/PI are significantly above the number of CS graduates per capita, and White/Hispanic are below.

That's useful. Whether or not that's the right number is difficult to say, but it's good to have some sort of baseline assumption to frame the rest of the piece.