Pinterest commits to a more diverse workforce

Silicon Valley has a diversity problem.

It is, as Fusion notes, the first of any company in the industry to do so.

The company will disclose its findings on what’s working or not with the public so the entire tech industry can gain some insight along the way, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp said in a blog post.

But, Beard writes, “we have more work to do”.

However, the digital scrapbooking and budding e-commerce platform has done something rather exceptional by publishing its hiring goals for 2016 with the plan to hire more women and minorities.

– Increasing hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30 percent female. The company is also examining its hiring process, including eliminating that all engineering interview candidates code on whiteboards and candidates referred by employees will no longer be given priority, Pinterest spokeswoman Jamie Favazza said. Similarly, just under 4 percent of Pinterest’s engineering team has an ethnic background that isn’t exclusively white or Asian.

Starting now, Pinterest will not only encourage, but require their managers to interview at least one woman and one person of an underrepresented ethnicity for leadership positions.

Companies have increasingly detailed their workforce diversity numbers – we’ve seen them from Facebook, Google, and more.

Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou has been one of the leading advocates for increased diversity in tech. In the blog post Pinterest revealed the company staff is lacking in diversity. This means nobody is having honest conversations about the issue. Inclusion Labs will be the continuation of these efforts – with the hopes of using Pinterest as a test bed to understand what’s working and what’s not and share that with others. Now that companies are regularly reporting their data, it’s clear not a lot of progress has been made since then.

The engineering department, for instance, is another story with a 81 to 19 percent male to female split, with 66 percent from Asian backgrounds and another 31 percent Caucasian.

That makes the 8 percent hiring goal a doubling of its usual average.

To achieve those results, Pinterest plans to expand recruiting to new universities, and start an intern program specifically for “freshman and sophomore students from underrepresented backgrounds”. Pinterest also plans to have its employees go through training to prevent unconscious bias.