Companies renowned as great places to work
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spent most of this year pressuring the technology industry into facing up to the glaring scarcity of women, blacks and Latinos at companies renowned as great places to work.
Now comes Diversity 2.0 – finding ways to reverse a deep-rooted problem that isn't going to be as easy to fix as writing new lines of code for a computer bug.
Some of the potential solutions will be explored Wednesday at a Silicon Valley summit organized by Jackson and his group, Rainbow Push.
Representatives from Google, Apple, Facebook and more than other 20 other tech companies will be on hand to elaborate on their plans to diversify their workforces. They'll also hear from entrepreneurs, academics and nonprofit groups that have been trying to overcome the cultural and educational challenges that turned computer programming into an occupation dominated by white and Asian men.
"It definitely feels like we are entering a new phase," says Laura Weidman Powers, CEO of Code2040, a San Francisco nonprofit that has been lining up technology internships for black and Latino college students for the past three summers. "When we first started, diversity just wasn't on the list of these large companies that have power and potential to make change. Now, it really feels like it is. They may not know exactly what to do yet, but they are interested in taking steps in the right direction."