Anna E. Cook, a UX Designer and independent contributor to Medium, is investigating and making known the problems a lack of diversity in tech have caused. She shares how TechGirlz is helping to end this problem and why it hasn’t already been solved. The full article was originally published August 28, 2019 on Medium.

While teaching with TechGirlz, I’ve learned how diversity has been systemically cast aside uniquely in the tech community compared to other industries. Personally, I have experienced gender in tech issues enough to know that these problems exist, but I never really understood why they exist or how they came to be. While systemic bias is prevalent across the U.S. and world, the tech industry in this country proves to be a unique circumstance. We are one of the few industries that still struggle with significant gaps while touting disruption and innovation. While hiring initiatives should be encouraged and a great step forward, they alone cannot fix the issues that come from deeply rooted systemic biases.

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What they don’t often realize is that hiring issues don’t start at the moment someone starts looking for a job. They start from the moment that a child begins to learn and they continue long after a career has begun. Hiring efforts fail to account for the intersectional nature of this issue. We can’t expect to solve this problem when only trying to fix it from one perspective. This is where the gaps live, in the places that our best intentions do not see.