MNBC's Jose Diaz-Balart hosted a Twitter chat with a panel of expert guests Tuesday concerning diversity in tech. The overwhelming response? That companies need to do more to hire Latinos. and educational institutions need to try harder to train them in tech fields.

The panel included notables such as actor Wilmer Valderrama from Voto Latino, Anita Li from Mashable, Brianna Garcia from Mic, and tech evangelist Vivek Wadhwa. Tweeters were asked to join in the discussion, and Diaz-Balart began the discussion by asking about why Silicon Valley lacks diversity. Only 7 percent of U.S. tech workers are Latino and only 6 percent are African-American. Compare this with whites, who make up 71 percent of the country's tech workforce, and Asians, who boast 16 percent.

Most respondents agreed that entry into the market was difficult thanks to the lack of diversity that already exists in the tech industry for certain minorities.

To help rectify that, the chat went on, tech firms should include underrepresented demographics in their recruiting, hackathons, and more.

You can view the full Twitter chat here.

The Twitter dialogue highlighted several key points, one of which was the education gap that minorities such as Latinos face.

"Although Latino high school graduates entered college in 2012 at a higher rate than their white counterparts, Latinos made up less than 9% of computer science and engineering college graduates in 2013," President and CEO of Voto Latino Maria Teresa Kumar wrote n an MSNBC op-ed piece. "Nationally, Latinos are also less likely to take Advanced Placement (AP) math, science, and computer science exams than their white and Asian peers."

To find out why, Kumar says we have to look back in time to when the tech industry began to burgeon, at a time where minorities where in an even more precarious state.

"In the 1990s and 2000s, when American households increasingly gained access to home computers and the internet, Latinos lagged far behind largely because both were luxuries their families could not afford," says Kumar. "While Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Napster's Sean Parker were learning to code in middle school, too many Latinos their age did not even have access to a home computer."

It's important to remember that despite the obvious hurdles facing Latinos and other minorities, transparency reports have focused more attention on the matter, which has fueled more outlets for interested Latinos. Voto Latino is currently taking applications for up to $500,000 in funding for tech projects to better the Latino community. With more incubators popping up and the fact that Latinos are among the fastest adopters of new technology, the Twitter chat itself shines a brighter spotlight on the lack of diversity in tech.

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