politics – Page 2 – Tina Amirtha

I hold a four-year STEM degree from an American institution, and I find myself working as an engineer in Europe. I’ve always been gainfully employed, but the opportunities were – quite absurdly – in Europe and not in the US in the late 2000s. To this day, I still can’t decide whether or not it was the American system that failed me or if a sweeping global force was at work. This is the debate that’s been going on the States since the end of last year.

Politicians in both the House and the Senate have been working on several drafts of a comprehensive immigration reform bill for a while. It wasn’t until recently that the so-called Group of Eight, a – you guessed right – group of eight senators agreed on a bipartisan immigration bill. It was passed last week in the Senate, with 68 supporters, 14 of whom were republicans.

Now, the bill has to make its round through the House of Representatives. It is thought that the republican-led house may squash the bill, but now, people looking for reform are hoping to sway their party to pass the bill. Mother Jones reports that the Republicans for Immigration Reform super-PAC plans to work the House in order to drum up support for the bill. Co-founded by the prominent republican Carlos Guttierez, former Secretary of Commerce in the Bush administration, the super-PAC hasn’t really seen the money roll in quite yet, but they’re working on it.

Republicans for Immigration Reform sounds a lot like Fwd.us, the Mark Zuckerberg-backed political lobby firm, who, as the Times‘ Somini Sengupta reported yesterday, was still looking for supporters. It has been floundering at getting republicans and democrats to come together on the immigration reform point. The company has lost liberal supporters because of advertisements that Fwd.us created to support unrelated issues, like the Keystone XL pipeline. One would be hard-pressed to find a liberal that supports that one.

Amazingly enough, there are other conservatives supporting the immigration reform bill. The cream of the crop, David Koch, is using his foundation, Americans for Prosperity, to financially pad the House’s deliberation.

So is this related to there not being enough Americans to fill these hi-tech jobs? It might not be.

For at least a couple of years, we’ve been hearing that there are too many vacant STEM positions and too few qualified people to go around in the United States. Much of this disquiet has been inspired by Silicon Valley CEOs lobbying in Congress to facilitate the administration of temporary work visas, called H1-B visas.

However, an April 2013 study from the Economic Policy Institute reported that STEM-educated people are not in short supply, as had previously been thought by the public. If they were, then you would have seen wages in the STEM fields go up in recent years. But wage growth has stagnated.

The study also found that around 50 percent of all US STEM graduates work in non-STEM fields after graduation. So, we have a surplus of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians.

Is this related to hiring the best candidate possible? Hmm.

If this is the case, then the best candidate isn’t necessarily the one that has the best formal training. The report showed that 36 percent of all IT workers had less than a four-year degree, and of the four-year degree holders, 38 percent had a STEM degree. These IT jobs represent 59 percent of the US’s STEM workforce.

STEM companies generally train people on the job, so a bachelor’s degree is not telling of talent. (However, all H1-B visa holders need to have the equivalent of a four-year degree – everyone except models!).

Or is it about paying foreign-born workers less? Maybe.

On average, the H1-B visa holder gets paid 20 percent less than an American who holds the same job, according to critics of the proposed policy.

The current immigration reform bill proposes making it easier for companies to sponsor H1-B visas for their employees. That means that the US would be opening its doors to foreign STEM graduates.

Good? Bad? The provisions look good for the most part. H1-B visas would be available in limited quantity to outsourcing companies, like Wipro but more widely available to all other kinds of STEM industry firms. That would ensure that talent, once it arrives in the US, stays there. But somebody has to ensure that these new workers get paid the same as American candidates. It’s hard to prove that on a case-by-case basis, but if wages stay flat or go up over the next few years in STEM industries, then that might be a good indicator.

I’m all for it if that means that technological innovation benefits from the wider pool of STEM labor. But I’m against if that means that it’s easier for a non-US citizen to start a life in the US than it is for a US citizen to return just because a visa holder will accept a lower pay grade than a passport holder.

Leave a Comment

A version of this post appeared on The Next Women on May 10, 2013. Here it is again.

In 2010, there was a slew of articles in the international press which questioned the Dutch female work ethic and depicted women in The Netherlands as part time workers, if they worked at all. Tina Amirtha looks at whether the coverage was accurate.

A few years ago, Dutchwomen got a lot of flak for not working so much. Suddenly, the entire feminist bloc of the West knew that the Dutchwoman, if she worked at all, commonly worked part-time.

There was an article in Slate, where the journalist Jessica Olien presented her observations of apathetic Dutch attitudes towards work, especially among its women.Coming from her brief sojourn in the country as an expat, her examination seemed to propel a mini burst of commotion in the media.

A blog post on The Economist tried to further solidify the reasons for which the average Dutch female did not want to work so much in the 2000s. From citing lower salaries in the Netherlands as compared to the US to positing these women enjoyed the power of wielding their inconvenient part-time work schedules over their bosses’ heads, no explanation seemed to get at the core of the issue.

Not much longer after that, The New York Times laid the record straight with in-depth reporting. Dutchwomen (and Dutchmen, for that matter) simply valued working part-time for cultural reasons. The Dutchwoman’s role in working society gained certain notoriety in this short period of journalistic pontification. Women in The Netherlands were seen as lazy, laid back, and the antithesis of what the modern woman has been striving for since the twentieth century.

Many journalists pondered whether the Netherlands implemented any policies to increase women’s roles in the workforce. The truth is, as these journalists eventually reported, the Netherlands has been aggressively encouraging women to work since the 2000s, although positive results have been slow coming.

A 2001 tax incentive program increased female participation in the work force by 3.5 percent within eight years, but it simultaneously made part-time work seem more financially interesting than working full-time. Although the policy had a positive effect on female participation, it did not boost male/female equality in the workplace.

Amid the cultural and political explanations for why Dutchwomen outwardly fail their professional lives, one does not have to look far for examples of high-profile female decision makers in the Netherlands.
A quick perusal of LinkedIn showcases several successful women in Holland. With loyalty on her side, Judith Renders is on the uptick of a 15-year career at ING, the global financial company. According to her LinkedIn profile, Ms. Renders started out as a management trainee in 1998 and has held VP and director positions since 2008. Currently, she is Managing Director of Global Credit Restructuring. She is similar to other female high-performers who spend most or all of their careers at one company, like Ursula Burns, the CEO of Xerox. An attachment to one company breeds career advancement.

While sticking to one organization may lead to a key to the boardroom, progressing through diverse businesses and making a leap into the academic world might be the right path. Pauline van der Meer Mohr is now President of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, a position that she holds alongside non-executive directorship at DSM, the private Dutch chemicals company. Like Ms. Renders, she spent a long stretch at the beginning of her career at Shell, developing into executive roles. Variety proved to be a charm, as Ms. Van der Meer Mohr’s LinkedIn profile shows that she has held various top positions at giants TNT, ABN Amro and Shell before jumping into academia.

An aggressive immigration policy to attract highly educated professionals to the Netherlands does make the Dutch numbers of female executives look good. One expat, Alexandra Kahn, a consumer marketing director at Philips Netherlands, has held directorship positions at the company since 2007. Originally educated in France, she holds one of the top positions in the Netherlands. Her story is not singular. A 2012 study by the Dutch consulting firm Berenschot showed that the amount of female executives in AEX- and MidKap-listed companies increased by three percentage points since 2007. However, around 66 percent of these new women had come from outside of the Netherlands, as it was in the case of Ms. Kahn.

To say that the Dutch and their women do not care about their careers is false. The Emancipatiemonitor, or Emancipation Monitor, has been monitoring female equality in the workplace and academia since 2000. In addition, a nationwide initiative, Talent to the Top, currently develops tailored equality programs to both industrial and academic institutions. Active policies and monitoring do point to a nation that is interested in changing its direction.Quantitative metrics for gauging the success of women in the working world might give us a clue about the Netherlands’ value on their female workforce.

Certainly, the EU wants to push the 40 percent women-in the-boardroom quota onto the Netherlands. Refusing this directive may seem insensitive to onlookers. But the policies and successes that are playing out in Dutch industry and academia signal a bright future for the Dutchwoman.

Category: politics

Foreign STEM Graduates

Do the Dutch Care About Its Women?