Code.org has taken the web by storm with its message of computer science for all — and according to its founder, Hadi Partovi, racial and gender balance in the tech world is a major underlying principle of that message.

“Ninety percent of schools don’t even offer computer science, and those aren’t the schools with lots of white kids in great neighborhoods,” Partovi said in a phone call with VentureBeat today.

“Coding is the American Dream. If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or even want a high paying job, those jobs are for programmers. … And yet the opportunity to be exposed to that is going to the top 10 percent, and that is just morally wrong.”

Code.org is an advocacy campaign focused at getting more kids interested in computer science. It’s also working to get more states, schools, and teachers on board with the program.

Related: Tackling tech’s gender problem the right way: Teaching women to code

The most visible aspect of its work so far has been a series of short films featuring the superstars of the digital age — Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey — talking about programming and how learning to write code can change lives for the better.

In those clips, Partovi told us, the Code.org team specifically attempted to get more women and people of underrepresented races front and center.

Here’s a short film that hasn’t been released elsewhere, given to VentureBeat by Code.org reps:

“For gender inequality, we care a lot about it, and we spent a lot of time in making these short films in paying attention to the right messages, making sure we had a balance of women and different races represented,” he said.

“The first female engineer at Facebook is the perfect example. She didn’t expect that this would even be her career. … The first part of moving the needle in the gender gap is giving them role models and dispelling misconceptions.”

Various studies have shown that by the time they’re in high school, girls steer clear of computer science because of preconceived — and largely inaccurate — ideas about what computer scientists do.

“With the montage we did of different workplaces, we wanted to get across that these are really great jobs, but also show that these people are working together in the sunlight rather than the typical media impression of what an engineer is — a geeky guy working alone in a basement,” said Partovi.

And as for the idea that girls are bad at math and therefore can’t code, a message that’s passed down in popular culture if not in tech culture, Partovi said, “Girls don’t get the idea they’re not good at math in third grade. At that point, building things on a computer is still like playing. … If you can start counting at zero, that’s all the math you need.”

Aside from getting kids away from intimidating media messages and encouraging them toward computer science careers, Code.org is also girding its loins for a battle royal with state governments and school boards. Getting more states to recognize computer science as a valid course and getting more schools to offer courses and clubs for computer science, Partovi said, “is the most important aspect of increasing diversity” in technology industries.

Related: Treehouse takes its coding education tools to Detroit

“Forty-one states don’t count computer science as part of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math curriculum],” he said. “That means the money that goes into STEM, none of it goes into getting more computer programming. The other issue is that for students in those states, studying computer science in high school does not count toward graduation. It’s just an elective.”

The end result: The only students who go into college with a decent understanding of code are those who can afford the time and money to study programming independently. Speaking generally, these kids aren’t at-risk economically, they’re not from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and they’re not girls.

“I have a 3-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son, and I’m basically using iPad games to teach them basic computer programming,” Partovi said as we wrapped up our interview.

“I think everybody should get basic exposure so they can make an informed choice. Most people never even know about the choices they’re rejecting because computer science isn’t on the menu.”

Image credit: Blend Images/Shutterstock

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Last week was the worst ever for social gaming company Kixeye. A former black contractor wrote in a Tumblr post (since taken down but reprinted here) that he was subjected to racist comments during a stint at the company earlier this year. Will Harbin, chief executive of the hard-charging San Francisco company, said he investigated the matter and fired three employees and a manager for behavior that didn’t meet standards.

Harbin said there were a few “bad apples” who had created a “micro culture” at Kixeye that was unacceptable and embarrassing, but most of the 300-plus employees are hard-working and conscientious. He said the behavior the contractor described — the parts that have been verified as true — are not defensible. Kixeye only has around  9.2 million monthly active users on Facebook. But it’s one of the most profitable game companies on the social network because it makes free-to-play hardcore games such as War Commander and Battle Pirates that monetize exceedingly well.

Harbin granted us an exclusive interview to discuss what happened. We discussed not only the incident, but the culture of racist comments that travels in some circles in online games when you play anonymously with strangers. Here’s an edited transcript.

GamesBeat: So tell us what happened and what you did.

Will Harbin: Tuesday, I was alerted to a Tumblr blog post by a former contractor of ours who worked in our [quality assurance (game testing)] department. He accused us of racial discrimination. He included quotes. Some of the names were changed, but it was enough for me to go in and figure out who this person was and where they worked on the team. So I started there and immediately did a personal investigation.

GamesBeat: He had not come to you before that?

Harbin: Definitely not.

GamesBeat: So that was the first time you’d (ever heard these allegations?)

Harbin: He was here a few months ago. As far as I know, the blog was posted on Tuesday. Anyway, through the investigation, number one, there was no record of any complaint. Number two, obviously I started with the manager of that group, his manager. While I found that the vast majority of the things in the blog to be suspect in terms of accuracy, I did find examples of very inappropriate behavior and unacceptable behavior according to Kixeye standards.

I immediately terminated this person’s manager. Over the next 24 hours, as I conducted more interviews, I did find that there was basically a small team … a micro-culture had effectively developed within Kixeye of this handful of people who had demonstrated some embarrassing, offensive conduct and behavior that I didn’t think was acceptable. I don’t think these people were racist or discriminating. It was a multi-cultural and multi-gender group. Multi-everything. But…

GamesBeat: It didn’t meet your standards?

Harbin: No. It didn’t meet the standards of Kixeye. Or any other company that I’m aware of. So I terminated them. That was the initial, immediate resolution around that and our investigations. Also, just to make sure that we have the full story, my vice-president of HR is working on it, and we’ve hired an outside investigator to come in and conduct interviews and do a very thorough investigation around the claims. So the thing was posted. It’s unfortunate that it was made public. I certainly don’t want people to think that this is indicative of a broader cultural problem at Kixeye.

GamesBeat: You have an aggressive company and an aggressive business. You want people to be doing kick-ass work producing kick-ass games. But there’s a difference between that…

Harbin: …and racist and offensive behavior. Those are completely different things. One is a matter of taste and a matter of marketing direction, so to speak. The other is a matter of law. And it’s not just law. I don’t want people to be uncomfortable working here. I want this to be a very comfortable working environment. I want everyone to love waking up and coming to the office every day, just like me. I want people to remember this as the best job they’ve ever had, and I want other people to come in here and have the best job they’ve ever had. We just want to make great games and great products, and we want to have great people working on them. I think a lot of people through this are confusing our external marketing message with our internal company culture. We’re a very diverse, multi-cultural company that has come together around one passion, which is making great games. That’s it.

GamesBeat: It’s not a frat house with inappropriate behavior all the time.

Harbin: Absolutely not. This is the furthest thing from any bro-gramming, frat house type of culture. I’d encourage anyone who’s made those kinds of allegations to come around and look at the office. We’re all nerds. Maybe people confuse our recruiting videos, or some of the confidence and the audacity to call out hypothetical competitors like that, for some sort of bro-tastic culture. I don’t know how to describe it. But I think people confuse the marketing message with how our internal culture works here.

GamesBeat: Speaking of confusion and what could have been going on in the minds of some of these people. … I think of Xbox Live and how there have always been racist and sexist comments you hear from people that you play with online. The confusion might be that that’s okay in the workplace…

Harbin: I can’t control what people say in their free time. I don’t have visibility into what people do in their free time. But we’ve made it very clear that sort of behavior is not acceptable in the workplace, during working hours. That is exactly why I terminated the four people I did.

GamesBeat: And you have some training that’s started as well?

Harbin: We already had training started a while ago. Obviously, we’re doing more now. We started by rolling out harassment training, sensitivity training, diversity training, and so on to the managers. Now we’re branching that out to the individuals as well and making sure that’s reinforced. In addition to that, it’s not just about what not to do. We want to be sure that people are good managers. We’re augmenting that with good quality leadership and management training. We’re helping people figure out how to create a good, open, accepting working environment, versus trying to just say, “Here’s what not to do. Here’s how you avoid a lawsuit.” That’s not what we’re aimed at. We’re trying to make a great working culture.

GamesBeat: You’re trying to stay a startup, as well as become a bigger company…

Harbin: Well, there are good things and bad things associated with a startup. We want to maintain high efficiency and productivity and fun. Those are things that you typically find in a good startup, and we want to keep them here. We can combine some of the best of both worlds. We want to take the good from a larger company and the good from a startup and combine them in one. That’s why we keep smaller game teams. It’s easier to manage. People have more clarity. There’s better communication and more transparency. People have more responsibility.

GamesBeat: You’ve communicated more than you have to, and more than most companies do when they’re in this sort of a situation. What’s the reasoning behind that? Why do you want to say as much as you have?

Harbin: I care a lot more about perception in the industry and perception of our employees. I do care what people think about Kixeye. I care what potential recruits and candidates think about Kixeye. I care about what the friends and family of employees at Kixeye think. I think I can do it in such a way as to be transparent and communicate with the public about things like this, without being legally risky.

We have a great company here. It’s well-run. There are going to be hiccups along the way given how fast we’ve grown, but we are doing everything in our power to make sure it’s a better place every day. It only took us 24 hours to swiftly and appropriately react. I don’t think many companies of our size can say that they’ve done something like that. I’m not going to play by any kind of standard PR handbook and just deny and defend and try to be political and distract people. I like to be direct.

If someone alerts me to a problem, I’m going to investigate it, and if it’s a problem I’m going to take care of it. Again, the reason we terminated these people was not for discrimination. We terminated them for offensive and unacceptable behavior at Kixeye. Someone alerted me to a problem, I investigated, I came to a resolution, and I did this extremely quickly. That investigation is ongoing.

GamesBeat: You have an independent person looking at this now?

Harbin: Yeah. I think one other point to clarify a bit more, just to put a sharper point on it: we did it because it was the right thing to do. It would have been easier, and in fact we were advised, to defend the position and stay out of the press. We felt that it was extremely important to go directly to the root, and to communicate that.

GamesBeat: Just for the record, there is no litigation so far?

Harbin: No.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else to clarify?

Harbin: No. Again, my hope is that we can show more people what a great culture and working environment we have here, as demonstrated by the people here and the products we’re creating. You can’t control every aspect of every person, but as soon as we find out about problems, we deal with problems. We’re committed to self-improvement in all aspects of the company. We’re also scaling extremely rapidly, and as we grow our teams, it’s important to make sure that all the management practices are in sync. This is obviously an example of an area that we need to improve. One team went off in their own direction, and the minute that we caught wind of that fact, it was calibrated.

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The Kapors, who founded the Level Playing Field Institute in 2001, got the inspiration for SMASH at a 2003 fundraiser they attended in Andover, MA, for a program called (MS)2. (MS)2 brought 100 disadvantaged African American, Latino, and Native American students from select public schools across the U.S. to highly elite prep school Phillips Academy for the summer. The program, which had changed the lives of hundreds of children, showed the students what they could achieve if they worked hard. Given the program’s results, the Kapors didn’t hesitate to make a generous donation.

But when Freada asked how many of the children were from California, she was disappointed, but not surprised, by the answer.

“After a bit of shuffling and staring at shoes,” she told me during my visit to the Stanford program in July, “I was told ‘none’ with an explanation that they had longstanding relationships with several high schools but none west of Chicago or Texas.”

California isn’t considered a priority given the popular myth that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy – a phenomenon I’ve previously highlighted. Blacks and Hispanics constitute only 1.5 percent and 4.7 percent respectively of the Valley’s computer workers — even lower than the national averages of 7.1 percent and 5.3 percent.

Mitch Kapor

The Silicon Valley elite  rarely get to interact with minorities, so stereotypes get propagated, which only serves to make the problem worse. Venture capitalists invest in people who fit the “patterns” of successful entrepreneurs that they know, and hiring managers bring in more of the same types of people they have seen achieve success — in other words: people like them.

Indeed, during the July visit, the Kapors recalled an encounter between Mitch and one of his young Latino colleagues a few years ago. He asked if Mitch invented Lotus 1-2-3 (Mitch founded Lotus Software, and it was acquired by IBM for $3.5 billion in 1995). Mitch said he was puzzled as to how someone in their 20s might know of a software program that was a blockbuster in the 1980s. He explained that his mother cleaned office buildings at night in Sacramento and would sometimes take him to work and let him play on the computer while she cleaned toilets and emptied corporate employees’ trash cans. For him, he said, this was the symbol of another life — of being successful. The interaction left Mitch in tears.

“How many Silicon Valley elites have ever had a conversation with the people who clean their offices,” he asked me, “do they see their kids as having the potential to be top talent in any field?”

This motivated the Kapors to establish SMASH — the Summer Math and Science Honors Academy at UC Berkeley. They established SMASH through the Level Playing Field Institute. While inspired by the (MS) 2 program, SMASH is not a replica of it. Instead, SMASH focuses on providing project-based learning and integrating science and math into contemporary issues rather than an intensive curriculum oriented towards standardized tests.

SMASH provides full funding for high-achieving, low-income high school students of color to spend time on campus for five weeks during the summers after their 9th, 10th, and 11th grade years. They are immersed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), conduct experiments and participate in group discussions. They are taught by leading scholars and provided access to the most advanced research equipment. Then they are provided with year-round academic support, including SAT prep, college counseling, and other support to ensure their academic success.

The results speak for themselves: 100 percent of SMASH graduates have been accepted to competitive four-year colleges, and the overwhelming majority persist as STEM majors, according to Freada. Kids from under-performing public schools who are eligible for free lunches have often never heard of MIT or Middlebury or Morehouse, but those are campuses now populated with SMASH alumni.

SMASH has grown since 2004 from one site at UC Berkeley to four sites throughout the state, including the one at Stanford. Another site is opening at the University of Chicago in 2013, and the program’s organizers are in discussions with 18 other campuses to expand nationally. The goal? Twenty-five sites by 2020.

The biggest limiting factor is funding. The program is expensive, and the universities — even those with large endowments, such as Stanford — still charge the startup nonprofit full price for room and board. It’s the single, greatest line item in the SMASH budget.

SMASH has a rigorous and evolving curriculum, experiments with blended learning, including MySciHigh, which won first place at a recent Startup Weekend. The program also has a detailed operations manual for launching new sites. A STEM teacher training academy is also in its sights as the program explores how to scale its success.

When I visited SMASH at Stanford in July and talked to many of the participating students. They called the program “life-changing” and talked about how it made them determined to become an engineer or a scientist.

Maria Castillo, a senior from Richmond High in California said the program inspired her to become an engineer so she could help solve the energy crisis. SMASH, she said, “inspired me to speak my opinions no matter what other people think.”

Hi Vo, a senior at Del Mar High School in San Jose, gushed about how excited he was about learning math and science because of the great scientists he met at Stanford. Daryle Alums, a student at KIPP King Collegiate in San Lorenzo, Calif., said SMASH got him interested in computer science and that he had started a company with his friends.

I have little doubt that these students’ excitement and the sense of hope they developed is infectious. We just need thousands more like them returning to schools around the country to inspire the others.

[Editor's note: A version of this story previously appeared on WashingtonPost.com]

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University and is affiliated with several other universities. Read more about Vivek Wadhwa’s affiliations.

Jeremy Lin is the talk of the NBA. Sportswriters everywhere are busy cranking out column inches on what people have called the ultimate Cinderella story: The emergence of an Asian-American Harvard graduate, seemingly from nowhere, as one of the NBA’s biggest stars.

On February 3, Jeremy Lin was the Knicks’ third-string point guard. Less than two weeks later, Sports Illustrated announced that they would put him on the cover of the February 20 issue with the caption, “Against All Odds.”

Yet one group wasn’t surprised by Lin’s success. A new breed of basketball statheads (the hoop equivalent of the SABRmetricians popularized in “Moneyball“) had predicted Lin’s success from the start.

Prior to the 2010 draft (where all 30 NBA teams passed on Lin) their analysis ranked Lin #10 out of all players, and #1 among undrafted players. This analysis is purely statistical; the models don’t consider height, vertical leap, foot speed, and perhaps most importantly, skin color. They simply look at statistical contributions made during basketball games.

Statistical analysis continued to rate Lin highly on his rookie season. He produced .157 wins per 48 minutes played, or more than 50% better than the average player, who produces .100 wins per 48 minutes played. (Incidentally, Carmelo Anthony produced .140 wins per 48 minutes played that season).

He also shone in the NBA’s Developmental League (a minor league of basketball), where he produced at a .211 clip.

In other words, when you looked at pure production, Lin was a top prospect. His rise only seems unlikely when you consider non-basketball factors, like his race or educational institution.

Trendy sports blog Deadspin tweaked the madness best, titling a February 7 blog post, “Asian Harvard Grad Somehow Succeeding In New York.”

It’s a funny one-liner, but it underscores a more serious issue.

Lin’s high school coach noted that his star player wasn’t recruited by any colleges, despite leading underdog Palo Alto High to the California state title. He also noted that the following year, a number of scouts came to games to watch another of his players who wasn’t as good, but was African-American.

Stereotyping has legitimate purposes. If you knew that Harvard University had produced twice as many presidents (8) as NBA players (4), you would be right to guess that any generic Harvard basketball player would be unlikely to make the NBA. But stereotyping only makes sense in the absence of better data.

In the case of Jeremy Lin, publicly available statistics proclaimed his value, but scouts preferred believing in stereotypes to trusting in data.

Sadly, this kind of bigotry isn’t limited to the world of sports. Even here in Silicon Valley, where we like to think of ourselves as a meritocracy, we practice a particularly pernicious form of stereotyping on a daily basis.

Investors love to talk about “pattern matching.” A common expression is, “I’ve seen this movie before.” There’s a reason why entrepreneurs constantly pitch themselves as “the AirBnB of ice skating” or “the iPhone of Valentine’s Day cards” (hmmm, that actually doesn’t sound so bad….).

This made sense in the absence of better data. When investors had to make decisions based on a PowerPoint deck and some rough prototypes, falling back on stereotypes was a good strategy. Indeed, I like to describe the default investing strategy of Silicon Valley as “invest in charismatic 20something Computer Science graduates from Stanford, MIT, and CMU (with Berkeley, UIUC, and Harvard as fallbacks), as long as they’re male and either Caucasian or Asian.”

In today’s world, with the ability to judge entrepreneurs based on a vast amount of publicly available data, ranging from social media to GitHub, with the ability to launch MVPs and generate tangible engagement and conversion statistics without raising money from investors, we now have the better data we need to make stereotyping AKA “pattern matching” AKA bigotry obsolete.

But old habits die hard. Just in the last few months, we saw a CNN special on black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Whether or not you feel that CNN used ambush tactics to help stir up controversy, the fact is that African-Americans make up only 1 percent of venture-backed entrepreneurs nationwide. And just last month, Whitney Hess conducted an analysis of top venture capital firms that showed that the most gender-balanced firm was Kleiner Perkins at 23% female, while the majority of those firms had zero female investors.

Discussing such topics makes people in Silicon Valley uncomfortable. Few of us like to think of ourselves as racist or sexist. Yet I know of many entrepreneurs who feel that they are overlooked because of their skin color, gender, age or simply because they didn’t go to the right schools.

Jeremy Lin has been called the Asian Tim Tebow (or is it that Tim Tebow is the white Jeremy Lin?); we need to extend the lessons of Jeremy Lin beyond sports to the startup world. Decisions need to be based on performance on the field of play, not race, gender, age, or education.

And for those who are the first to recognize “pattern matching” for what it is, the rewards can be great. How many of those other 29 NBA teams could use Jeremy Lin on their team right now?

Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. He also blogs at Adventures in Capitalism, where the above story also appears. The story is reprinted here with permission. 

The shopworn adage “It takes all kinds of people to make a world” is never more controversial than when applied to technology startups.

“It takes all kinds of people to make a product” is much less accepted; diversity often gets short shrift when meritocracy is a supposed ideal and both time and funding are short.

However, having diversity of all kinds on a startup team can actually end up saving time and money. In this interview, Julia Hu, founder of Lark, explains exactly how and why founders should go out and consciously create diverse teams.

Lest you think she’s telling tales out of school, Hu herself has some big announcements this morning. Lark, the “silent un-alarm clock” she’s spent the past couple years working on, is going international at Apple stores in China and the EU.

“There could have been no greater start for us than to be sold in all Apple stores,” said Hu in an email this morning. “It was like being drafted to play and start for your hometown team. We were ecstatic.”

In addition to the hallowed shelves of Apple stores, you can also find Lark devices at Target stores, Best Buy, Walmart, Radio Shack and soon at Brookstone.com.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The U.S. tech industry has a race problem.

Anyone who’s worked in Silicon Valley for any length of time will have noticed the alarmingly large number of white guys occupying positions of power. There are good-sized groups of Asian entrepreneurs among the entrepreneurial and venture capital classes. But there are not many women and there are almost no black or Hispanic entrepreneurs or VCs.

Despite the incredible diversity of the Bay Area, the people at the top of the Silicon Valley power pyramid have a depressing sameness. An upcoming CNN documentary called Black in America looks at the issue by following a group of black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Thanks to early previews, the show is already making waves, and it hasn’t even aired yet. Check out Soledad O’Brien’s update on the controversy, which is as good a place to catch up as any. (If you want to watch the show, VentureBeat’s Chikodi Chima will be moderating a discussion at an upcoming screening of Black in America, while the show will be broadcast on November 13.)

The same is true of the tech industry elsewhere in the U.S. According to the Level Playing Field Institute, women hold just 20 percent of the computer software engineering and programming jobs nationwide. Meanwhile, African-Americans have just 7 percent, and Latinos only 5 percent of those jobs. The reasons for that are varied and often misunderstood.

But there is something we can do about it.

If you’re black, Hispanic or female, you’re going to need an extra dose of moxie, persistence and determination to make it in tech. You will probably want to connect with others through business networks aimed at supporting people like you. Some people have taken more drastic measures, as Vivek Wadhwa did when he hired a white man to be the public face of his company. (Wadhwa also points at the importance of building your own networks.) These decisions will have to be up to you and whatever friends and allies you recruit to help you.

If you’re one of the white men in positions of power in tech, you have a responsibility too, and that’s what I’m going to focus on for the rest of this column — because that’s what I know about. As a white guy who has worked in Silicon Valley for almost two decades, I have tried to live up to this responsibility for personal as well as ethical reasons.

Here are my tips for white guys on how to fight racism and sexism.

First, educate yourself. Compared to people who have experienced prejudice, you don’t know squat about racism or sexism. So read. Watch movies. But most of all, talk to people. Find people who are trained in anti-racist education and invite them to educate you and your staff.

In my case, I have spent many, many hours in anti-racism seminars, educational programs about race and culture, and dinner table discussions with my family, extended family and friends. It’s a topic that is never far from my mind. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it has given me some understanding of the issues, and I hope it’s made me a more effective advocate for diversity.

Second, make an effort to connect with people who are different from you. Make friends with a variety of people. Extend your social circle.

And really make friends. Early in my education, a friend once told me, that the diversity of your circle of friends is best measured by who comes to dinner at your house. You may work with people who aren’t like you, but if you’re not having them over to dinner, you’re not really getting to know them.

My kids go to a school where there are people from diverse racial and economic backgrounds, my neighborhood is all over the map economically and racially, and I live in one of the most diverse areas in the country. It’s only when I start talking to PR people and Silicon Valley executives that the diversity level drops. But it’s taken me a decade of conscious decisions to get to this point.

Third, when you’re recruiting, widen the circle of candidates. Make decisions about who to hire (or invest in) based on merit. But make sure the pool is diverse, so you can at least make fair choices.

I try to follow this principle whenever I hire people. I’ve reach out to professional associations like the National Association of Black Journalists. Groups like the Black Founders of Silicon Valley or Women in Technology International can be helpful. I ask people I know to recommend talented women they know. I ask for help from my existing networks wherever I can get it.

Once I get that pool of candidates, I evaluate everyone based on their merits. I’ve never given a job to anyone because I wanted to increase the diversity of my team. But I have gone to lengths to make sure that the pool of candidates is diverse.

This is, I think, the most important thing that white people in positions of power can do.

There’s a real benefit to this diversity, too, beyond some abstract notion of fairness. A diverse workforce is going to better at producing products that appeal to a broad range of customers.

And diversity breeds creativity. People who come from different backgrounds are more likely to have different approaches to problems, or different ideas. Bring them together and, yes, there can be conflict and misunderstandings. But out of that conflict can often come much better ideas than you’d get from a roomful of people who have the same backgrounds.

Finally, be willing to talk about race. Realize that you are going to sound like a clueless idiot much of the time. But also know that for people of color, race and racism are constant topics of discussion. Race is an incredible taboo only for white, middle-class people. We are often embarrassed to talk about it, or even to acknowledge it. But until we do, we can’t really learn. And yes, I am sure it sucks when someone holds you up as an example of white-guy cluelessness.

But when you refuse to talk about racism and race, whether from fear of embarrassment or out of ignorance, you can’t learn. If you pretend that it’s just a meritocracy, or that the problem is too mysterious to be addressed, or that you yourself are not racist, you can’t learn.

More importantly, you can’t do anything good about it.

I don’t expect that most white men in power will follow these steps. It’s too uncomfortable and too difficult to do. But I can say that it’s something very much worth doing. The benefits are real, not just for yourself but also for your company and the tech industry as a whole.

An earlier version of this essay appeared on my personal website.

Top photo: Keo Akana/Flickr. Lower photo: Yuri Arcurs/Shutterstock.

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We like to think of the tech sector as a colorblind, gender-blind meritocracy; unfortunately, this simply isn’t an accurate picture.

Women in tech often have different experiences and encounter different challenges than do their male counterparts. The same goes for people in underrepresented ethnic groups.

Last week, VentureBeat published Why more women aren’t working in tech (hint: it’s not just education), which discussed the Level Playing Field Institute’s recently released report, The Tilted Playing Field, a study on how biases we may not even know exist, are present and affect workplace environments.

As Ms. O’Dell summarized:

“The report states that biases inherent in the average tech workplace make it a less-than-inviting environment for women and minorities, who deal with negative workplace experiences, such as exclusionary cliques and bullying at much higher rates than do their male and white counterparts.”

Since the study documents and analyzes the observations and experiences of individuals currently working within the IT industry, we believed that the findings and coverage would encourage honest and critical conversations about the experiences of women, Blacks, Latinos and other underrepresented groups in the IT sector.

We hoped that these findings would lead individuals to engage in rich discussions about what equity, fairness, and meritocracy truly mean in work environments. For example, what constitutes the ‘best qualified’ candidate for an engineering position? Is it a top graduate of a top engineering school? Is it a self-taught college dropout? Is it someone who has made major contributions in large companies or the entrepreneur of a failed start-up? These are charged and fascinating topics.

Instead of vigorous debate, we were perplexed and disheartened to see a number of comments discounting the data emerging from this report, not based on facts and evidence, but based on personal opinion and anecdotes. One common response from the mostly male responders was that these data must be incorrect and misleading because they personally have not witnessed these issues. In other words, if I haven’t seen or experienced bias, it cannot possibly exist.

The thought that their own experiences (as members of a gender majority group within tech) are representative of the experiences of all individuals within tech is both problematic and telling.

Interestingly enough, when presenting these findings at different companies and organizations, we got the same response time and time again from the women and people of color who work in IT: “This data doesn’t surprise me at all; it is perfectly aligned with what goes on here.”

Indeed, this is the primary purpose for undertaking this research: to document experiences of underrepresented individuals and counter myths and assumptions that are pervasive in the IT sector. In the interest of continuing this conversation, we wanted to address these myths head on and challenge critics questioning the validity of the experiences of this sample of women and underrepresented people of color in IT. In many ways, the most important take-away of our research is that despite our shared work environment, we don’t experience it the same way.

Myth 1: IT environments are true meritocracies.

We have this idea that in tech, everyone is treated the same, and that treatment is based based solely on ability and skills (not gender or race).

Many tech workplaces believe in meritocracy and claim this distinction as a point of pride. Yet, decades of empirical research show that despite our best intentions, unconscious, subtle biases affect how resumes, journal articles, theater scripts, interviews, and merit-pay decisions are made.

Here are a few examples: An interviewee with an accent is rated less favorably and less likely to be hired than an identical interviewee without an accent. Women and racial minorities with the same level of performance (and same job, supervisor, work unit) receive lower merit-pay increases than white males.

Our research adds to this literature, finding that women and underrepresented people of color reported encountering far more negative workplace experiences than their counterparts.

Were these actions intentionally perpetrated to exclude these individuals? Probably not. Are these individuals being ‘oversensitive’? The data suggest that diverse employees let a huge number of incidents go by and are far more likely to quietly leave rather than complain.

So, did these actions disproportionately impact underrepresented groups, and challenge the idea that these environments are completely meritocratic? Absolutely.

During one recent presentation at a major tech company, several of the men loudly protested that they didn’t believe the negative experiences women reported. As part of the discussion, we asked groups to circle up and discuss possible solutions within their company. The men immediately turned their chairs toward each other to chat, excluding the one woman in the group and dominating the conversation.

This drives home one of our main points: It is critical to examine your own hidden biases and those that may exist in the form of practices or culture within your workplace. For example, consider how important employee referrals are in the hiring process. Whom would you recommend your company hire for an IT job? Where are your positions advertised? While we recognize that these sources may identify good candidates, they also systematically and subtly skew the candidate pool to be more homogeneous.

Myth 2: Technical skills and productivity are all that matters; diversity is not important.

Diversity within companies on teams, in leadership positions and on governing boards has been increasingly documented as valuable to business outcomes by numerous researchers (also see Scott Page’s The Difference, a book that explores the effects of diversity in businesses and schools).

Yet surprisingly, discussions about the importance of diversity tend to dissolve into arguments about hiring less qualified candidates for the sake of diversity and instituting “quotas.”

A diverse candidate and a highly-competent, skilled, well-educated candidate are not mutually exclusive.

Within this study, the data reveal that there are very different beliefs about the importance of diversity and support of actions to increase diversity based on demographic group. This research in no way suggests hiring less-qualified candidates to make companies less diverse. In fact, the research simply suggests that while evidence shows that diverse candidates can improve outcomes for organizations, there may be a lack of effort taken to recruit highly competent and qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds.

One finding indicated that while 60 percent of men in startups believed that diverse teams are better at innovation and problem-solving, only 41 percent would be in favor of a company-wide hiring practice to increase diversity. If 60 percent believed that knowing how to code made for better hires, would only 41 percent be in favor of hiring people who know how to code?

Myth 3: The lack of women and underrepresented people of color is only a pipeline problem.

Women and underrepresented people of color are far less likely to take computing coursework or exams in high school and complete degrees in computer science and engineering. This is a fact.

Yet we also uncovered evidence in this report that suggests women and people of color have extremely different workplace experiences. An increase in negative workplace experiences is significantly negatively related to job satisfaction and positively related to likelihood to leave.

This tells us that while there are not as many women and people of color in the current pipeline to drastically change the demographics of the sector, there are also practices within the sector that are problematic. First, The lack of focus on diversity means we continue to hire those that are in our networks, went to our schools, and look just like us. Second, negative experiences (which affect women and people of color at higher rates) lead to turnover.

Thus, while not suggesting that the demographic trends in IT are entirely due to bias, we are also suggesting that they are not entirely due to the pipeline either. The following questions remain unanswered: How many have left IT for another sector? How many found the IT work environment unwelcoming or incompatible and sought employment elsewhere?

We challenge you to replicate this study in your own companies and examine the experiences of underrepresented groups. We hope this can stimulate an important dialogue.

Allison Scott, Ph.D., is the director of research and Freada Kapor Klein, Ph.D. is the founder of the Level Playing Field Institute, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization that promotes innovative approaches to fairness in education and the workplace by removing barriers to full participation. The Institute helps reveal and remove the barriers that prevent underrepresented groups from achieving all they can.

Image courtesy of naezmi.

According to a new report from the Level Playing Field Institute, IT workplaces, including tech startups, can create hostile or unpleasant environments for women and people of color, leading to those employees seeking out other companies or even other industries for work.

The report states that biases inherent in the average tech workplace make it a less-than-inviting environment for women and minorities, who deal with negative workplace experiences, such as exclusionary cliques and bullying at much higher rates than do their male and white counterparts.

“The IT sector is one of the fastest growing in our country, yet women and people of color continue to be vastly underrepresented,” said LPFI Executive Director Robert Schwartz, Ed.D.

“Previously we’ve pointed to problems in the STEM education pipeline as the reason for low rates of women and people of color in IT positions. But the findings in this report clearly show that there are also significant concerns with company culture and workplace experiences of underrepresented professionals.”

The Level Playing Field Institute, or LPFI, is an organization dedicated to exploring and eliminating the gender and ethnicity imbalances and biases in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) communities.

The report is called Playing Field: An Examination of Hidden Bias in Information Technology Workplaces. It shows that subtle and implicit favoritism in both large IT enterprises and startups ”can produce unequal opportunities and outcomes for employees depending on their race and gender.” The study uses data collected from a sample of IT engineers and managers in large companies and small startups around the United States.

In addition to encountering more bullying and being negatively effected by cliques, women and underrepresented people of color saw a higher likelihood of experiencing negative workplace incidents. And the more negative work experiences each person reported, the less likely she was to be satisfied with her job and remain working for the company.

In other words, subtle sexism in tech workplaces is making women and minorities want to move on.

Nevertheless, the study also showed that for most hiring managers, maintaining a diverse workplace was not a high priority. In spite of the fact that most of the companies polled showed diversity stats representative of the rest of the tech industry (i.e., few women and underrepresented people of color), 68% of the managers and engineers polled said they were satisfied with their company’s diversity efforts.

Not surprisingly, women and minorities were much more likely to favor more diversity in the workplace. In fact, underrepresented people of color were almost twice as likely as white employees to want a company-wide policy to increase diversity (80 percent compared to 46 percent).

As a result of these subtle (and sometimes overt) biases and lack of diversity in the workplace, woman and minorities in the report were less likely to feel they had a career path at their current company or that they were adequately developing their skills and abilities. Likewise, the same groups were more likely to be looking for a new job or planning to leave their current job within the year.

It’s not surprising that negative workplace experiences were linked to job dissatisfaction. What is disturbing is that these factors were so closely tied to gender and ethnicity.

In the report’s conclusion, LPFI recommends more research on these biases. The authors of the paper also challenge everyone working in the tech industry to confront their own biases and to support productive conversations about these biases within their companies and communities.

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