Exclusive: Pinterest launches innovative diversity project

Jessica Guynn | USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Pinterest is taking a bold stand in the push to increase diversity in the technology industry.

The San Francisco company is setting ambitious goals to hire more women and minorities — and it's making those goals public to hold itself accountable.

This marks the first time that a major technology company has peeled back the veil of secrecy to this extent.

What's more: Pinterest is opening an experimental lab inside the walls of the company to apply the human ingenuity that has created so many modern marvels in Silicon Valley to testing new strategies for building more diverse, inclusive companies.

Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp says the company plans to share what works and what doesn't so the tech industry at large can learn from the effort.

"By sharing these goals publicly, we're holding ourselves accountable to make meaningful changes to how we approach diversity at Pinterest," Sharp said in a blog post released Thursday. "We'll also be sharing what's working and what isn't as we go, so hopefully other companies can learn along with us. Over time, we hope to help build an industry that is truly diverse, and by extension more inclusive, creative and effective."

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, who has pressed the reticent technology industry to make concrete commitments, commended Pinterest.

"Pinterest is putting a huge stake in the ground by setting specific, measurable goals, targets and a 2016 timetable to achieve its diversity and inclusion goals," Jackson said. "We have said: 'If you don't measure it, you don't mean it.' Clearly, Pinterest means it."

Pinterest has been at the forefront of the diversity in tech movement since one of its engineers issued a call to action two years ago.

Tracy Chou, who had experienced the stark lack of diversity firsthand while working for Facebook, Google and question-and-answer service Quora, uploaded a spreadsheet to the code-sharing platform Github and challenged tech companies to make public the number of female engineers in their ranks.

Her goal: To gather data that would shed light on just how profound a problem the technology industry was wrestling with and to encourage the industry to make a stronger commitment to address it.

"The actual numbers I've seen and experienced in the industry are far lower than anybody is willing to admit," she wrote at the time in a piece on Medium. "This means nobody is having honest conversations about the issue."

Since then, major technology companies from Google to Apple to Facebook have stepped forward, reporting diversity statistics on an annual basis. The statistics are sobering, showing the industry is dominated by white and Asian men.

One year in and there is more information, but there is also very little progress. Pinterest is no exception.

"We are not proud of how little our numbers have moved in the right direction," Chou said in an interview.

On Thursday, Pinterest provided an update on its workforce demographics.

Pinterest has more women overall than most tech companies: 42%. But men dominate tech (79%), engineering (81%) and leadership (84%). Women fare better in business where men account for 34% of employees.

Like most tech companies, Pinterest is overwhelmingly white and Asian: Half the company is white and 43% is Asian. Underrepresented minorities remain a tiny fraction of the Pinterest workforce. African Americans account for 1% overall and in tech, 2% in business. Hispanics fare slightly better: 2% overall and in tech, 3% in business. The leadership of Pinterest is 47% white and 42% Asian.

Pinterest said it has made some "modest" progress in gender diversity over the past year in greater numbers of new graduate engineers and summer interns, but not enough, Chou said.

"We are trying to double representation of women and minorities in the tech industry," she said. "We felt like this was the right step to take. We are going to be accountable and set goals which are ambitious but that we think are achievable. I think it will drive us internally to work much harder because have made a public statement."

Pinterest said it wants to increase hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30% women, full-time engineers to 8% underrepresented minorities and non-engineering roles to 12% underrepresented minorities. Currently the hiring rates are 21% women and 1% underrepresented minorities in engineering and 7% underrepresented minorities in non-engineering roles.The hiring rate is defined as the percentage of women or underrepresented minorities hired in the past six months.

Pinterest also plans to implement a Rooney Rule requirement similar to the NFL where at least one minority and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position, expand the number of universities it recruits from and launch an intern program to identify freshman and sophomore students from underrepresented minority groups.

In addition, every employee will be asked to participate in training to combat unconscious bias. And Pinterest is supporting a training and mentorship program for African American software engineers led by Pinterest engineer Makinde Adeagbo.

But the groundbreaking step for Pinterest is its novel partnership with Paradigm, a strategy firm that consults with tech companies on diversity and inclusion.

With help from Paradigm, Pinterest has begun to collect more "granular" data beyond overall demographic numbers, for example breaking out engineering roles from technical roles, so Pinterest can measure and learn from the data and communicate it clearly, said Joelle Emerson, CEO and founder of Paradigm.

Pinterest is expanding its recruiting network to colleges and universities with more diverse student bodies, is hosting events such as Blacks in Tech event earlier this week and a Future Female Founders event in June and it's scrutinizing the hiring process for bias to make changes, such as eliminating the requirement that engineering candidates code on a whiteboard and no longer giving priority to candidates referred by employees.

In addition, Pinterest is working on fostering a more inclusive culture. It has added questions to the company survey about inclusion, is training managers on how to write unbiased performance reviews and training promotion committee members to identify potential areas of bias in promotion decisions, Emerson said.

Now Paradigm and Pinterest are setting up "Inclusion Labs" to experiment with new ways to boost diversity.

"Pinterest is opening itself up to us as a testing ground for new ideas," Emerson said. "We have a lot of work to do, Pinterest is not a model of success, but I do think it's a model of clear dedication and taking the right kind of approach to trying to have the right kind of outcome. We are going to invest a ton of time into this partnership with them. And I think it's worth the investment of our time. If this works, we can start to demonstrate how to build a more diverse and inclusive company in an effective way."