Tech summit addresses industry's lack of diversity

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson spent most of this year pressuring the technology industry into facing up to the glaring scarcity of women, blacks and Latinos at companies renowned as great places to work.

Now comes Diversity 2.0 — finding ways to reverse a deep-rooted problem that isn't going to be as easy to fix as writing new lines of code for a computer bug.

The challenges, along with some of the potential solutions, were explored Wednesday at a Silicon Valley summit organized by Jackson and his group, Rainbow Push.

In a show of their commitment, Google, Apple, Facebook and more than other 20 other tech companies sent representatives to the forum held at the Santa Clara, California, headquarters of a Silicon Valley pioneer, computer chipmaker Intel Corp. The crowd of roughly 300 people also included entrepreneurs, academics and nonprofit groups eager to change the cultural and educational milieu that turned computer programming into an occupation dominated by white and Asian men.

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