(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden’s Commerce chief pledged to use part of the $52 billion package that Congress is weighing for the American semiconductor industry to invest in training that helps diversify what’s a notoriously male-dominated workforce.
The proposed chips investment will create tens of thousands of jobs in a sector where only 10% of workers are women and 4% are Black, Secretary Gina Raimondo said at Bloomberg’s Equality Summit. She pledged to put part of the proposed funding to work in apprenticeships and job training in partnership with businesses.
The investment is “a massive opportunity to make sure that the folks who get these jobs look like America,” Raimondo said in a virtual interview for the summit, broadcast Wednesday.
Congress has been wrangling with the legislation, designed to strengthen U.S. competitiveness against China and bolster domestic chip production, for months, with different versions of the bill passing the House and Senate. A final package is expected to require House-Senate negotiations and unlikely to be finalized before the end of May.
Read more: U.S. Commerce Chief Engages Trump Veteran in Push for China Bill
Raimondo also pledged to make sure that some of the 150,000 jobs expected to be created by the $65 billion package for building universal broadband access — enacted as part of a bipartisan infrastructure bill last year — go to women, people of color and workers without a college degree. Raimondo said that she’s already working with internet service providers to make that happen.
“We’re going to use some of the 65 billion on highly effective apprenticeship and technical-training initiatives,” she said. Some of that will involve providing “wrap-around services” like childcare and transportation, which are essential to helping boost the participation of women, she said.
The Commerce secretary reiterated the Biden administration’s argument that the U.S. is falling behind its peers in competitiveness in part because of a failure to support bringing more women into the workforce.
The U.S. needs programs like universal public pre-kindergarten schooling for every three- and four-year-old, all-day kindergarten and affordable access to childcare to bolster female employment, Raimondo said.
“You cannot be serious about equity and not fund these proposals,” she said. “America lags the rest of the world. It’s an embarrassment that we don’t have better childcare, paid leave, universal pre-K. It is holding us back. It is making us less economically competitive.”
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