A new advisory board that’s tasked with “improving the diversity and inclusion of people in tech leadership roles” is calling for companies to start hiring more women, including women of color.
“In the tech sector, we’ve all experienced this moment where people of color, people of other identities, people who don’t fit in, or people who do,” the advisory board said in a statement published Wednesday.
“We need to recognize this, and help bring about change in our tech industry.”
The company also called for the government to invest in training diversity and equity training in the tech workforce, and for the hiring of more women of colour in tech.
The tech industry has seen a huge rise in women of all backgrounds in recent years, and the company has said it plans to invest $1 billion to improve diversity in its workforce by 2020.
The diversity advisory board is not the only group trying to bring more women into tech.
In May, a group of more than 30 companies called for more women to take the top positions at Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more, and to create a new gender diversity group at LinkedIn.
On Wednesday, the tech community said that in the past two years, women have started working in less-popular roles in tech, and said that they were “dealing with the consequences of gender bias” in their workplaces.
The TechCrunch article also noted that while women still hold less than 10 percent of tech positions, “women make up roughly 50 percent of the U.S. population.
They represent one-fifth of the senior leadership of Fortune 500 companies, and one-third of all venture capital investors.”
