Intel is one of the top companies prioritizing initiatives that bring diversity to its company and Silicon Valley, including making a $300 million pledge to the diversity "pipeline" like sponsoring partnerships and programs for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education for underrepresented minorities and women.

The company also publicly set measurable diversity goals to encourage accountability, and the company's statistics over the past year have proved its progress.

Overall, Intel has had a 30 percent increase in underrepresented employees in its workforce in a little over a year, and surpassed its diversity hiring goal by bringing on over 43 percent of new employees that are either women or minorities.

Inclusion and Resistance, Even Inside Intel

Diversity isn't just about numbers though. It's also about fostering a culture of inclusion inside technology companies, and the industry as a whole.

And as Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told the audience at Rev. Jesse Jackson's PUSHTech 2020 summit in San Francisco last weekend, prioritizing diversity -- the way Intel did starting with Krzanich's keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2015 -- hasn't happened without pushback, even from inside the company.

Krzanich told the PUSHTech 2020 summit that there has been "a bit of a backlash within the company" since making diversity Intel's top priority, as TechCrunch reported.

"People worry that as a white man, you're kind of under siege to a certain extent," Krzanich detailed. "There's been a bit of resistance. We've even had a few threats and things like that on some of our leadership team around our position on diversity and inclusion."

Later, an Intel spokesperson elaborated (a little) on the nature of the threats, writing "The context here is that any time you undertake a big initiative it's a journey and an ongoing process toward change and evolution... the words can mean many things so this is the context."

Intel's CEO, however, stated that he had a standard way of dealing with any resistance to change or "threats" from employees. "We stand up there and just remind everybody it's not an exclusive process," Krzanich said.

"We're not bringing in women or African-Americans or Hispanics in exclusion to other people," he added. "We're actually just trying to bring them in and be a part of the whole environment."

Talent Versus Opportunity

While Intel makes progress in its statistics, and slouches towards a culture of diversity within the workforce as well, much of the rest of Silicon Valley has announced diversity as a priority for them as well.

Many, like Facebook and Apple, are committing millions worth in building the "diversity pipeline," boosting STEM education among women and minorities.

But as Rev. Jesse Jackson told Digital Trends in a post-summit interview this week, he sees the technology industry's diversity problem as more of an "opportunity crisis" rather than a pipeline problem.

"We found that there's an unbelievable amount of talent being passed over with the idea that there's a talent crisis when, actually, there was an opportunity crisis," said Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Beyond Tech, Beyond Diversity

He said there are plenty of talented and trained women and minorities ready to work in technology and related fields that are also important to the technology industry.

"These young people are already studying STEM fields. They are studying engineering and computer science, as well as the non-tech areas," said Jackson, noting that there are plenty of non-STEM positions -- advertisers, marketers, lawyers, etc. -- that are essential to Silicon Valley as well, but which have not been inclusive of minorities.

"The fact is that there are more non-tech jobs than tech jobs, and the tech industry for too long has gotten away with not reaching out to the talent that already exists," said Jackson.

On the diversity movement's progress towards opening those opportunities, Jackson said, "We still have a long way to go."

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