Pinterest: Goals Needed To Increase Tech Diversity

Workforce diversity, particularly in tech, is a problem for social bookmarking site Pinterest. Last year, tech giant Google released their diversity statistics which showed that white and asians accounted for an astounding 94 percent of their technical employees. When it came to gender, 83 percent were men. With the release of these statistics, Google admitted it was a problem. Like Google, Pinterest has also struggled with diversity issues. According to Pinterest’s blog, Pinterest is dominated by white and asian men who hold a formidable presence in the tech and engineering fields. In an attempt to address this, over the years Pinterest has set hiring goals which have had some degree of success. With regards to gender, Pinterest has seen an overall increase in female employees by 2 percent, an increase in engineering interns by 4 percent, and an increase in female engineers hired out of school by 5 percent, according to their blog. Their progress in improving racial diversification has been lacking, however. Coming up in 2016, Pinterest is going to push forward even further to address this. Along with new tactics to increase ethnic diversity through recruiting, Pinterest has partnered with Paradigm to “experiment with new ways to improve diversity” through the implementation of “Inclusion Labs.” (We plan to get there by) Work(ing) with outside strategy firm Paradigm to set up Inclusion Labs at Pinterest, where we’ll experiment with new ways to improve diversity. According to a blog post by Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson, Inclusion Labs will be used to “conduct innovative workforce research to identify and better understand barriers to diversity.” They also plan on releasing the findings of their research to the public to promote a healthier and more diverse industry.