Last October, I posed the question: "Where are the numbers?". It was a call to action for the tech industry to share metrics on diversity in the workplace. Without measurement and transparency, it’s impossible to have honest conversations about making tech more inclusive. Since then, more than 150 startups have shared their women in engineering numbers, and some of the largest and most prominent tech companies have published their stats.
Today we’re taking our latest step by giving a more holistic look at our demographics across the company. We’re not close to where we want to be, but we’re working on it.
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Our vision is to help people live inspired lives—people across the world, from all walks of life. We only stand to improve the quality and impact of our products if the people building them are representative of the user base and reflect the same diversity of demography, culture, life experiences and interests that makes our community so vibrant.
As we look ahead, we’ve put particular focus on inclusion efforts in hiring earlier in the engineering pipeline, recruiting a 29% female inaugural engineering intern class last year and 32% female this year. Beyond hiring, we’re mindful of processes and practices that may affect success and retention of employees coming from less represented backgrounds.
We’re also working with organizations that are effecting real change, including:
- Collaborating with Girls Who Code, CODE2040, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Anita Borg Institute, Hackbright Academy, and Out for Undergrad
- Working with the creators of the documentary CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap
- Hosting local events around Change the Ratio and Grace Hopper
While we’ve made some progress in diversifying gender at the company, we haven’t done as well in representing different ethnicities, and we’re focused on getting better. We still have a lot of work ahead of us to make Pinterest a global company, as we build a global product. However, we’re excited to be a part of a broader movement in the tech industry to make it a more diverse and inclusive place.
*Gender and ethnicity data are global and include hires starting through September 2014. This is not based on EEO-1 reports; however, ethnicity refers to the EEO-1 categories which we know are imperfect categorizations of race and ethnicity, but reflect the U.S. government reporting requirements.
**Other includes Biracial, American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander.
***Tech includes Engineering, Product Management, and Design. Business includes all disciplines outside of Tech.
Tracy Chou is a software engineer and tech lead at Pinterest.
