The reality is that diversity, whether it is women in tech, ethnic minorities or almost any other demographic suffers from pipeline issues. In some cases, retention issues are a problem too. At the very youngest ages, between 9 and 11, the gender split is as good as 50:50. Older generations fare much worse at this moment in our history. Hopefully those younger generation numbers will retain as we journey to the future and they get older, but traditionally there is an anti-correlation. people leave at different points in the flow. Hence, it will be some time before we see the necessary numbers come through. So we have to stem the losses.

I’ve suffered a similar fate, which I’m very public about. I turned down Oxford University here in the UK more than 20 years ago partly for the context presented in the article. There is no way you can come out of that context with people feeling like this and acting the way they do, without there being a problem with a diversity issue. At the time, Oxford sent me a Black prospectus all those years ago and it was evident from that they missed the point entirely. Sure enough, in the last couple of years we’ve seem “I am Oxford”, which showed me it had not changed one bit in all that time.