Jennifer Lopez might have garnered the most attention from an audience not used to hearing business pitches from global pop superstars last week at the Venture Capital Association's VentureScape conference. But it's her father David, co-founder of the Latino startup-focused Manos Accelerator, who most challenged the assumptions of those investors in budding businesses.
Intel has announced its 2015 plan for a more diverse workforce, and Google has joined in with its own $150 million initiative to get more women, African Americans, and Latinos into technology.
A new program is looking to boost diversity in Silicon Valley from the ground up, by giving a select few minority entrepreneurs a whole year of resources to take their startups to the next level. Now backed by Google, CODE2040 has announced the first three winners of their pilot Entrepreneur in Residence program.
If you've been hiding under a rock for the past year, when a cavalcade of Silicon Valley workplace transparency reports were released, here's the news: Most high tech jobs and leadership positions tend to be held by white men.
Last year, Apple was put under popular and celebrity pressure to fix its emoji -- the cartoon graphical icons often used in messaging -- and add diversity to the mostly all-white cast of characters (not counting the classic yellow smiley faces, of course). It appears that change is coming soon to the next OS X and iOS updates.
Google may have begun last year's ongoing public conversation about the technology industry's lack of diversity by finally being transparent about its workforce demographics, but Intel (which has regularly released such reports for years already) will become the first tech company to do something about it.
This year we've learned a lot about the tech industry's employee diversity, or lack thereof. Now, a new survey by the Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition reports that at the top levels of Silicon Valley companies, even fewer minorities can be found than elsewhere.
Amazon's diversity statistics are predictably similar to the rest of Silicon Valley, but Amazon stands out from the rest in what it didn't disclose. Meanwhile, Jesse Jackson has called for more egalitarianism from the tech industry.
This summer there has been a cascade of disclosures from technology companies, starting after Google revealed its workforce diversity statistics. So how do they stack up?
Pinterest joins the latest round of tech firms reporting diversity figures in an attempt to shed some light on the makeup of Silicon Valley's workforce. The figures? The company's report shows there are barely any Hispanics, but more women than rivals.
Jesse Jackson continued his push for diversity in Silicon Valley this week, calling a more representative workforce in the country's high tech industry the next step for civil rights.
This week in social media, Facebook took a victory lap on Wall Street, while Twitter's earnings next week look to be disappointing. Also disappointing, but not surprising, were the diversity figures released this week by Twitter and Pinterest.
The lack of diversity in Silicon Valley has been a recent topic of concern, as large tech companies Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and, most recently, Facebook release not-so-stellar diversity statistics. One thing has become clear from the recent influx of diversity reports from these companies (each of which deserves credit for at least starting the conversation): White men rule Silicon Valley.
Google may have released unflattering diversity figures recently (in a move that at least got the conversation started about the lack of minorities in Silicon Valley), but the tech giant is at least trying to bring about change. One initiative, a continuing partnership with Latino startup incubator Manos Accelerator, has just announced its second round of startups for its program.
Google released information about the diversity of its workforce, and the news isn't very positive. Most of the giant company's workforce is made up of white men. There is a positive side to the story though, as Google is at least acknowledging the problem with full transparency, which the National Hispanic Media Coalition says is the first step towards an "honest conversation" about the lack of diversity in tech.
Apple has said it wants to add more ethnic diversity to the little cartoon characters, called emoji, available to iPhone and Mac computer users. The characters, which are like graphically-enhanced emoticons originated from Japan and, while the graphic icons often many things from Japanese culture, there are no emoji Latinos or Black people.
