Nas, Google, Microsoft, General Assembly and Hirepurpose have united to created a fund to provide scholarships to women, veterans, African-Americans and Latinos, according to BetaBeat.
“This is the start of what hopefully will be a contribution to what will be a more diverse and accessible community worldwide,” General Assembly CEO Jake Schwartz said in a statement to BetaBeat. “There’s sort of a like-attracts-like issue in engineering subcultures. It’s the ‘brogrammer’ syndrome.”
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This “brogrammer” issue is further detailed by BetaBeat.
“Most programmers, coders, developers, and engineers are white and Asian men, and census data shows that even where there are enormous minority populations, those ethnic groups can go almost entirely unrepresented in tech,” the site says. “California, for example, has a 38.1 percent Hispanic population — twice the national average — and Hispanics don’t even make up one percent of tech founders.”
Nas reportedly became involved with the fund when he met GA cofounder Matt Brimer at SXSW.
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