

The Shame Game: Jesse Jackson to take on tech's lack of diversity - slapshot
http://www.sfgate.com/business/technology/article/Jesse-Jackson-to-take-on-tech-s-lack-of-diversity-5328762.php

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chiph
Disclaimer: I grew up in the same town as he did, and I _really_ don't like
him very much.

I think he's taking the easy way out. It's easy to shame people because it's
negative.

What I'd like to see him do is approach someone like Khan Academy and work
with them to get more women & minorities learning the skills needed to work in
high-tech. He should work on reforming the education system and get younger
kids (of any race) knowing that it's OK to be smart and build stuff.

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HillRat
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.

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MrZongle2
More accurate headline: "Jesse Jackson to take on tech industry's lack of
contributions to Jesse Jackson".

A lack of minorities in tech is secondary to this clown. He's a divisive self-
promoter, and has been for decades.

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sremani
I know this day will come. I am always amazed how and why Asians are
conveniently excluded from minority discussion.

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HillRat
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.

