There were small gains in some areas, relatively flat numbers of Black employees but there was a drop in  Intel's female employee headcount in the US compared to last year and a similarly minuscule increase over the same period for Intel's total global workforce.

The percentage of underrepresented minorities in the US workforce ticked up by a fraction of a percentage point, coming in at just over 16 per cent. African American representation was flat at 4.9 per cent.

Intel's interim chief diversity and inclusion officer Dawn Jones said the numbers were moving slower than she liked, but at least “the conversation is on the table.

To be fair, Intel’s inability to significantly boost the diversity of its workforce is far from unique in the industry. Normally when Fudzilla writes a story about diversity there are long list of comments from men saying that women are shite at programming and diversity efforts are “political correctness gone mad.”

Intel wants to set up an industry-wide effort that would work to help standardise ways of measuring different diversity statistics from one company to another, although we would have thought their efforts would be better spent getting some numbers right rather than worrying about other people’s numbers.