China girl, pt. 3: the economics of exclusion costing us $100 billion a year in American defense when we shut out women

Or: how losing ten MIT graduating classes of female engineers annually cost us $4.5 trillion while China mobilized theirs

Part 3’s subsections:

1. The STEM pipeline hemorrhage - where we lose women at every transition point

2. The attrition cost - $2.8-3.9 billion annually in preventable losses

3. The prime directive needs reworking - how defense contractors fail at parity

4. The systematic sorting problem - horizontal segregation within engineering disciplines

5. The economic hit - $100 billion every single year

Let’s get specific about what this culture of exclusion costs us, because I did the math and it’s worse than you think. While China mobilizes 2.85 million women in technical roles who start contributing to military capabilities on day one, America hemorrhages 10,000 to 13,000 female engineers annually. That’s ten MIT graduating classes walking away from engineering every single year.

Part 1 and 2 of this series established the reality that China fields 10 times our drone fleet, closed an 80% AI capability gap …