The tech industry has poured an estimated $1.2 billion into diversity initiatives over the past five years, according to Intel and Dalberg’s 2016 Decoding Diversity study, yet the investment has barely moved the needle. Racial and ethnic minorities today secure only 1% to 2% more available jobs in the industry than they did 15 years ago, according to the same report. There are a wide variety of theories as to why this is the case, ranging from a lack of diversity in executive leadership teams to an exclusionary corporate culture, but the bottom line remains the same.

In fact, the industry known for propelling the world forward continues to lag behind the rest of the American private sector’s workforce when it comes to diversity—by about 16-18 percentage points, according to the Decoding Diversity study—and some are beginning to question whether there’s more that can be done. READ MORE