The tech world's workforce is largely a white male club. Fortune magazine surveyed nine Silicon Valley giants back in the summer of 2014 and found that minorities accounted for just a tiny fraction of the companies' workforces. Not only that, but in no company were women making up 50% of the employee workforce. This has not gone unnoticed, and many companies are feeling pressure to diversify, but will it happen?

Backing up a step, it was long assumed that the "problem" was that women and minorities weren't going into STEM fields in college, so there wasn't a qualified applicant pool. Research has shown that is not the case. A USA Today study showed that top univerties graduate minority science and computer engineering students at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them. So there's no supply problem in terms of talent. And at Stanford and Berkeley, 50% of the introductory computer science students are women. Which makes it interesting, then, that twice as many men as women with the same qualifications were working in STEM fields. The numbers quite clearly indicate that there are plenty of ready and able women and minorities, so what gives?

The problem is in the culture of the tech world. Gender and racial bias are so ingrained in the culture of the industry as to be invisible. It would be hard enough work to change the culture of the tech companies, but a nearly impossible task since the reality is that the tech industry is unaware of its bias. And it's not that women and minorities aren't getting hired, it is that they are being driven out of the industry. On average, women end up working in tech for about seven years, and then they leave. Why? They report implicit and explicit discrimination related to their age, race, sexuality, gender, and motherhood.

Several companies of the Bay Area's heavy hitters have vowed to make cultural changes to ensure the success of their diversity outreach programs. And that's great! The problem is that not everyone thinks this problem is real. Take Brian Hall, for example. He wrote an editorial that lasted on Forbes for all of about twenty-four hours before being removed, but of course the proud, anti-censorship internet has preserved his thoughts and ideas. Is the article so bad? At face value, you could try to say that he is being light-hearted and really focusing on work ethic more than anything else. But unpack it a bit and I think you can find some of that first assumption: that maybe some people just aren't qualified enough. And then, maybe if they're qualified, the problem is that they don't have the grit to make it. And who is the "they" he is talking about? Given the article's title, I think he is talking about women and minorities.

Some companies are feeling pressure to change, but do they really see the problem beyond the numbers? In other words, simply hiring a more diverse workforce may look good in the short term, but can you keep that talent? Because you can't keep the talent if the work environment is hostile. Brian Hall is not alone in expressing the feeling that "there is no diversity problem". There are many voices like his and that makes it very difficult to change the culture of an industry, but it can be done. And it starts with us.