This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
For many years, tech companies have been really good at innovation and making money.
What they've been less good at is in hiring and keeping a diverse workforce.
In the past few months, frequent reports of Silicon Valley's rocky relationship with women.
Have bubbled to the surface.
Very few women and non asian people of color in engineering their diversity or.
Lack of diversity, and what they plan.
On doing to tackle it.
Many companies have gone to great lengths to study the problem and to address it.
Google, for example, spends tens of millions of dollars every year on efforts to recruit more women and people of color.
Some of that money went to produce this video, make it really clear, we.
Want to see more women in senior leadership positions.
We want to see more people from.
Underrepresented groups because it makes us a better company.
While there are recruitment success stories in Silicon Valley, the overall results have been dismal.
Many women, African Americans and Latinos say tech is unwelcoming to them.
Some have filed discrimination lawsuits against their companies.
One senior software engineer at Google, James Damore, recently suggested his company and the tech industry were going about it all wrong.
In an internal memo, he argued that the vast gender gap in technology wasnt the result of prejudice, but of biological differences between men and women.