Pinterest Has New Plans to Improve Diversity

In addition, the company also announced a few goals essentially refocusing its new hiring practice. It’s no secret, given the statistics, that the tech industry is generally dominated by white men, with 85% of the employees worldwide being male.

With diversity numbers barely budging this year at other tech firms, civil rights activists have been calling on tech firms including Facebook and Google to set more measurable targets for diversifying the workforce.

To meet the 2016 diversity goals, Pinterest will expand the number of universities from where they recruit.

As part of its diversity goals, Pinterest wants to increase its hiring rates for full-time engineering jobs to 30 percent for women and 8 percent for minorities as well as 12 percent for minorities in non-engineering jobs.

“By sharing these goals publicly, we’re holding ourselves accountable to make meaningful changes to how we approach diversity at Pinterest”, Sharp promised. Around that same time, a study came out that revealed that black head coaches, despite winning a higher percentage of games, were less likely to be hired (and more likely fired) than their white counterparts.

Pinterest has been praised in the past for its gender and ethnic diversity.

And the company says it will work to ensure that at least one woman and one underrepresented background candidate is interviewed for every open leadership role.

That inspired Sharp to share Pinterest’s goals and the company’s plans for achieving them.

Three of those lawmakers are heading to Silicon Valley next week to plead their case to companies.

Also, every Pinterest employee will participate in training to prevent unconscious bias and the company will be launching a training and mentoring program for black software engineers, the company said. While companies do talk about their initiatives to make the work environment more female-friendly, or to encourage more women to go into or stay in computing, there’s no way of judging whether they’re successful or worth mimicking, because there are no success metrics attached to any of them. Hiring of individuals from under-represented ethnic backgrounds in other departments will be 21 percent. Pinterest will require managers to interview at least one woman and one person from an underrepresented background when hiring for leadership positions.

“We have said, ‘if you don’t measure it, you don’t mean it.’ Clearly, Pinterest means it”, Jackson said in his statement.