>This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas I agree. > Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the

>This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas I agree. > Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the good candidates of minority descent This contradicts your first point in a way. If we essentially overlook say white or Asian candidates in favour of recruiting from potentially worse schools with a lower quality of student, simply for the sake of introducing diversity in our workplace, then not only are we consciously trying to fill a quota (i.e. there are not enough X minority here, instead of going to MIT and looking for candidates, we'll overlook them and go to X community college or whatever) but we're being racist in doing so. >And since there won't be enough to go around (that's the premise after all) then agitating at the secondary school level to get Everybody included in the tech revolution. Absolutely. I mean it's an interesting and complex issue. Much of the disparities in the tech industry come from a place of somewhat fortunate circumstances - many of us are from middle class or higher backgrounds, with fathers who were engineers or similar, and so had access to better schools who provided their students with access to computers, along with having computers in the home at a time where many wouldn't have. But it also comes from luck and being in the right place at the right time. Being into technology not so long ago was relegated to a status of being for nerds, geeks and other supposedly anti-social labels. The people who were into it pursued it, despite its stigma, and as luck would have it the skills they developed in doing so turned out to be very valuable today. As such, I absolutely do not support overlooking these people when hiring simply to fill a perceived void pushed by the mainstream media these days. We now live in a different era, where even lower social or economic classes have widespread access to technology. To address the perceived disparity, the focus should be on getting these people to pursue technology from a young age, as you said. It should not be addressed by attempting to shame companies into overlooking what are the best candidates in favour of others simply because they've a different skin colour, a different set of genitals, etc.