In October 2013, Tracy Chou publicly challenged tech companies to tell the world what percentage of their software engineers were women. Surprisingly, it worked. Within a year, Apple, Facebook, Google, and others had all published their lopsided gender numbers— and race stats, too. Chou, then an engineer at Pinterest, became a face of the tech diversity movement. Pinterest branded itself as a company trying hard to hire women, blacks, and Latinos. In 2015 it published a set of ambitious goals, including hiring women for 30 percent of its open engineering jobs. The pinboard site met some goals—including that at least 8 percent of new engineering hires be black, Latino, or American Indian—but only 22 percent of engineers hired in 2016 were women. For this year, it’s lowered the goal to 25 percent. “Obviously, we were all hoping it would be better and closer to 30  percent,” says Chou, who co-founded the advocacy group Project Include in May and left Pinterest in June. (She says she wanted to try something new.) Pinterest says it focused on hiring women for more senior positions, which take longer to fill, and that its targets are meant to be challenges. “Setting public goals focused and encouraged the team to have more authentic conversations and learn more about how to make meaningful progress,” says Candice Morgan, head of diversity. Pinterest is doing better than most. The typical tech giant’s diversity numbers have barely budged in the past two years, and some have fallen. At first, many companies tried to make hiring more “blind”—stripping names and pictures from résumés, for example. Some now want to do more than cover their eyes.

Questions for Discussion 

1. What are some of the reasons why engineering departments in Silicon Valley tech firms might be dominated by white and Asian men? 

2. Why are tech companies trying to hire for diversity? 

3. Why are some tech companies having a difficult time hiring for diversity and/or reaching their diversity goals? 

4. What are the potential advantages and disadvantages of linking manager bonuses to diversity hiring?