society's high IQ groups, while nothing is left for African-Americans and Latinos
- that's a pretty racist remark. Are you implying that only whites have high IQs? You're also incorrect - there have been a number of astronauts of all races, and almost every space (and engineering) company actively works to increase the number of minorities and women in engineering disciplines. And it's working, slowly. I was just at a conference for internet hosting companies, and the percentage of 'minorities' and women was much higher than I would have seen even 10 years ago.
But it's still difficult to find even one US woman in graduate computer science programs, and the vast majority of 'minorities' in those programs that I've seen have been from outside the US. Anecdote: I was back in school a few years ago. At that state school, the graduate CS program had 0 American women, and 0 American blacks - and well over 1/2 the program was foreigners. But about 20% of those foreigners were women. The foreigners knew that success here meant the difference between a comfortable middle class life, and not. Interestingly, the school's new building was named after a foreign student who went through the EE program, succeeded, and gave the school $12 million for the building.
Societally the hardest part of increasing the number of technically educated youngsters is changing the culture within the home and early school to encourage and support analytical thinking, rational discourse, and motivation to achieve on the merits. It's hard to be a 'geek' kid when everyone in your class laughs at you, calls you names, and shoves you into lockers.
The "ultimate revenge of the nerds" is that they grow up to be engineers, and build the world everyone else has to live in! :D