The technology industry has a long history of failing at finding, retaining and elevating women of color.

Its easy to see how the needs of minority communities have been ignored, discriminated against and underrepresented in tech largely because their presence is almost nonexistent in a field dominated primarily by white men.

After all, Black women hold 3%, Latinas hold 1% and Native American women hold just .03% of technology jobs, according to research from womens advocacy groups. Similarly, though Asians have become the second-largest racial group of tech professionals, behind white people, research shows Asian women are less likely to become executives in Silicon Valley than their white peers.

Of course, its not just a lack of diversity that affects minority groups. As is the case in so many aspects of life, implicit and explicit bias against women and people of color can also run rampant in the tech products we see every day.

Facial recognition software is a profound example of that. In 2017, Joy Buolamwini, an activist and a computer scientist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, found that several face analysis software struggled or failed to detect faces with darker skin tones or varied facial structures . She said the programs flaws came from machine learning data sets that underrepresented people with darker skin tones.

And implicit bias can show up in other forms of artificial intelligence software. A ProPublica investigation found that software by Northpoint, a consulting and research firm, used to predict the likelihood that criminal defendants would become repeat offenders overestimated risk for Black people and underestimated risk for white people. Black defendants were 77 percent more likely to be pegged as at higher risk of committing a future violent crime than white defendants, according to the organizations research.

Without women of color to help bring their experience to the designing table, people of color and women are left unserved by technology.

Tackling Weak Points

In the last few years, a wide range of groups and organizations have started tackling the industrys weak points. There are advocacy groups, like LatinoTech and Black Women Talk Tech , which help fund, support and prepare entrepreneurs, engineers, designers and more to change the tech landscape.

And now Morgan Stanley, one of the worlds premier investment banks, has created the Multicultural Innovation Lab to examine the issue. They found that the lack of investment in marginalized and underrepresented groups is a trillion-dollar loss for the tech industry.

The Lab published a study , which stated in part: We can only imagine what businesses might have taken off, what products consumers might have enjoyed, and what innovations and returns might have been realized had women and people of color enjoyed equal access to capital and opportunity, the study reads. (There have been numerous studies and accounts over the years showing female founders get turned away by predominantly-male investment boards.)