The Shame Game: Jesse Jackson to take on tech's lack of diversity

Going after board appointments and funding is probably the right way to build forward motion, though. There's a real capital acquisition problem for female and minority founders, which generally leads them to seek funding from regions less-experienced in tech investments and less plugged into the industry. Board members in the tech world are almost uniformly white guys, which is IMO a performance and innovation problem as much as an optics problem.

Improving diversity in STEM is a hard problem, because it begins with fetal and early childhood development and goes all the way through adulthood. But improving executive culture by increasing access for qualified persons can be done now.

Asians (East and South) are themselves underrepresented in board appointments, though, so I feel like they're actually part of the larger discussion.

One thing I've seen a couple of times is kind of an ethnic version of a reverse IPO, where minority-managed funds use pedigreed white guys to get them access to more desirable investments in exchange for discounted capital. There's a market failure in there based on a kind of ambiguously structural racism, but it's also gotten a couple of projects off the ground that otherwise might not have been able to get the right kind of term sheet.