Even though it has been commended for the commitment it showed to diversity, Pinterest feels it can do more. Boasting over 600 employees, the company has announced on Tuesday its 2016 diversity goals.
With over $1 billion in funding and a market value of $11 billion, Pinterest has decided to become even more transparent with its users, in hope that making the information public will help them reach their goals.
Ever since 2013, when Pinterest engineer Tracy Chou wrote a blog post about diversity and called on other tech companies to reveal their statistics on the matter, the company has started to issue formal reports, hand in hand with other big players in the business that took on the challenge.
It was no later than a year that Google, Facebook and Apple joined the publishing trend by releasing official diversity reports that painted the picture of their internal workforces. With the second annual reports currently rolling out, statistics show that white men are still undoubtedly dominating the field.
And Pinterest is no exception; according to co-founder Evan Sharp, the past year only brought “modest progress” in this regard. Their annual updated report reveals that even though women currently make up 42 percent of its workforce, the great majority of employees are white (49 percent) and Asian (43 percent).
Men are predominant in the company’s engineering, leadership and tech teams, with only one exception in non-tech jobs: 66 percent of the employees are women. Sharp added that the lack of particular goals could be one reason why it was so difficult to change the numbers in the workforce.
Thus, Sharp decided to make Pinterest’s targets public along with the plans the company will make in order to achieve them. According to his blog post, 30 percent of new engineering hires will be women, and 8 percent will come from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
At the same time, managers will be required to interview at least one person from an underrepresented background and one woman when considering employees for new leadership positions. Recruiting practices will also change, as the company plans to launch an “early identification intern program.”
Sharp also wrote about “freshman and sophomore students from underrepresented backgrounds” who will be considered for training and mentorship; Pinterest will also launch a program for black students who want to become software engineers.
Its formal move into diversity research has been supported by a partnership with consulting firm Inclusion Labs. For the last seven months, Pinterest has been the test bed for various methods that would increase diversity, and Inclusion Labs hopes to share with others the ones that work.
Image Source: Fortunecialis for bph
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.