Professor Richard Thompson Ford is cited in this USA Today Tech article for his participation in a Tech Diversity panel at SLS on November 6, 2014. 

Silicon Valley isn't home to unrepentant bigots who want to keep minorities out of tech as much as it is a place with a word of mouth culture where hiring has bred a largely white male workforce.

That was one of the many themes at USA TODAY's panel on diversity in tech organized in association with Stanford University's Rock Center for Corporate Governance Thursday, featuring representatives from Google and Facebook as well as the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

“Most of the problems will be resolved by trying to get hiring managers to see diversity as a positive goal, but in many ways that's a harder problem to solve than one of unrepentant bigots,” said Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford law professor and author of The Race Card.

Ford said that universities contribute to the problem when computer science classrooms feel like alien places for many minorities.

“Will you find racists in computer science department? No, but you may find people with preconceived ideas of who will be good or not (in tech),” he says. “There's a culture that exists in those department, one of who helps who. And if you're not comfortable, maybe you go, 'I could do something else, I've got options.'”