Despite its global prominence, and years of investment from the tech industry's loudest voices and biggest pocketbooks, AI still has a diversity problem. Filling an increasingly worrisome gap created by the tech's creators and evangelists, diversity-based organizations have been trying to tackle that issue on their own. Black Girls Code for example -- which offers tech skill building for Black girls and other historically underrecognized groups -- has been leaning more heavily into AI as part of its tech preparedness and training curriculum, including creating the brand new position of AI Expert-in-Residence to oversee a more thoughtful approach to teaching about AI. "Most AI is built in environments that prioritize profit over people, which means bias gets baked in and the same communities left out of past tech waves are now at risk of being harmed again. It's not enough to teach people to use AI, we have to teach them to be thoughtful about the tools that they use," Black Girls Code CEO Cristina Mancini tells Mashable. What values does it reflect?

When it comes to the current state of Black women in tech, the vibes are ominous. Then there's the desire of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg for more "masculine energy" in corporate America, which only added to the feeling that Silicon Valley was growing ever more hostile to women and People of Color. Aside from the anecdotal evidence, the numbers don't lie: Only 19 percent of computer science bachelor degrees are earned by women, approximately 3 percent are earned by Black women, and only 2 percent of tech roles are held by Black women, according to data from the organization Black Girls Code. BGC's mission is to increase those numbers by partnering with schools, companies, organizations, and volunteers to offer Black girls in-person and virtual learning opportunities. Cristina Mancini, a former executive at Salesforce and 20th Century Fox, took the helm of BGC in late 2023, announcing at the time her push for workforce development and a goal of seeing one million girls of color in tech by 2040.

Whether you call it the metaverse, megaverse, or multiverse, our future selves will undoubtedly live in a world mixed with real and virtual experiences that is unlike anything we know today. And that future will be built on the backbone of unfathomable amounts of code. As much as I'd like to believe that code is infallible and unbiased, it's not. Coders are human, and for the last 40 years those humans have been primarily white men. Even today, 65 percent of computer programmers are white (non-Hispanic), and the nonprofit group Girls Who Code reports only 22 percent of computer programmers identify as female.

If you are an aspiring programmer, software engineer, or data scientist -- or even a student just starting a computer science degree -- you may find yourself wondering, "Who should I look up to?" If you belong to a group that is underrepresented in computer science, such as people of color, women, and LGBTQ people, this might seem like an especially hard question to answer. The good news is that we have some famous computer scientists of diverse backgrounds to share with you who might be able to offer inspiration. Computer science has not always been dominated by white men -- rather, the field is a patchwork of creative and innovative thinkers from all races, genders, and backgrounds. With time, this patchwork continues to become more diverse and inclusive.