For quite some time, I’ve talked about diversity, or lack thereof, in certain technology based companies, like Google. One woman is responsible of shining the light and challenging this issue.
An engineer for bookmarking website Pinetrest named Tracy Chou called for statistics in how many women worked at tech companies. Chou herself did research on her own company and found out Pinetrest has 11 women engineers out of 89 overall engineers. So Pintrest has 12% women engineers. Chou established an online data center so other engineers could investigate diversity in their workplaces. Over 170 companies were researched, even big names like Yelp and Survey Monkey. After Chou’s research, the number of women engineers at Pinetrest rose to 21%.
Before long, major, mega tech companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter started doing their own research of diversity. They studied racial as well as gender diversity in their own workplace. The numbers were often woeful. Back in May, Google shocked the technological world with it’s own report: of all it’s employees, only 2% were African-American and 3% were Hispanic. But at least the issue can be addressed because now we know. And great ideas are being thrown out there to combat lack of diversity in the technological workplace. And things can change. After Tracy Chou’s research, the number of women engineers in Pinetrest almost doubled. So I salute her for getting the ball rolling and encouraging others to look critically at workplace diversity. How can a problem be addressed when people don’t know there’s a problem at all?