In January, Intel announced plans to spend $300 million over the next five years to improve the company's diversity, aiming to reach full representation of minority groups by 2020. In its first mid-year diversity report, it says it's on track to reach this target, with its diversity hires — new employees who are female, African American, Native American, or Hispanic — up from roughly 20 percent of total hires last year (according to USA Today) to 43.3 percent over the last six months.

"I think we started this process thinking that the pipeline was empty and we'd have to start at the very beginning," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich told USA Today. "But we were all pleasantly surprised that there's actually a pretty good pipeline going." He added that recruiters for the company found that "if you go to the right colleges, the pipeline is there. I won't say it's easy, but it's certainly something that can be done."

However, Intel — like the vast majority of the tech industry — still remains overwhelmingly white and male, and despite more diverse hiring, overall representation of female and African American or black employees is only up slightly (0.6 percent and 0.1 percent respectively), while representation of Hispanic and Native American individuals remains exactly the same (8.3 percent and 0.5 percent in Intel's figures).