While many industries struggle with diversity, it would be hard to find one that has progressed as slowly as the otherwise fast-moving world of technology.
A few months ago, I was talking to a venture capitalist from a leading Silicon Valley
company. I asked how concerned he was that the Valley now came across as pale, male and somewhat stale. He was complacent. As far as pale was concerned, he told me Google was “virtually an Indian company”. Male bias? That was not the Valley’s fault; women just would not knuckle down and get engineering degrees. When I pointed out that I had run software companies without being able to write a line of code, he shrugged and turned back to fine-tuning his PowerPoint slides. The implication that Silicon Valley might in any way be getting stale did not seem a problem.