Representation of women and people of color in Silicon Valley has long been cited as a serious problem, but this issue has in recent years been pushed to the center of conversations about technology and society. At this year’s SXSW Interactive, a four day technology conference in downtown Austin, TX, many sessions focussed on diversity in tech, creating spaces at the conference and online for participants to express both optimism and frustration with issues of opportunity and representation in technology.

The Kapor Center for Social Impact, an organization based in Oakland with a venture capital arm that supports work at the intersection of technology and social change, hosted a panel on Saturday called “Beyond the Diversity Data: Strategies That Work” as well as a $500 start-up pitch contest for “seed and pre-seed stage founders of color”.

Sitting on the panel was Lisa Lee, who leads diversity initiatives at Pandora. She addressed the need for a top-down approach to prioritizing diversity as a company. “It’s one thing to have a diversity recruiter reaching out to a group of people. It’s a totally different thing to have your CEO talk about diversity at a company meeting.”

Lee also pointed out geographical problems in recruiting engineers of color, citing that over 60% of black Americans don’t live in the Western region of the United States. “We now look at distance traveled in hiring.”

Echoing Lee’s argument, Makinde Adeagbo, an engineer and head of recruitment at Pinterest, described Silicon Valley’s diversity problem as more than just a pipeline issue that begins and ends in high school and college classrooms, in a session cheekily titled “How to Not Hire and Retain Employees of Color”, also on Saturday. “The number of black engineers in tech companies is still lower than the number of black engineers graduating from top schools.”

Ana Diaz-Hernandez from the Kapor Center also sat on the panel, calling out start-ups who emphasize “culture fit” as a culture of weak internal communication and “mirror-tocracy”.

Audience members jumped in with the panel on twitter with the hashtag “#moreofus. “Personally, I think “culture-fit” is made more complex than it should be, culture should always be evolving, not stagnant,” said Candace Queen, an Austin-based designer, responding to Hernandez.

Across many panels this weekend and scheduled for the coming days of the conference, attendees and speakers are challenging long-held ideas of what Silicon Valley culture looks like.

“Impressive , conference room full of tech savy latino entrepreneur women #latinoTech” tweeted @julianitaM.

The panel “Diversifying the Tech Workforce: Impact at Scale” generated a particularly lively discussion about the need for a culture change in tech. “We will navigate cultural differences to get code from halfway around the world but not from halfway across the city,” said Hank Williams, founder of Kloudco and Platform and a presenter on the panel. “The set of biases triggered by a white kid showing up in an interview in a hoodie is different than a minority kid.”