Women in tech band together to track diversity
[...] the three — along with five other prominent Silicon Valley women from companies including Pinterest, Stripe and Slack — are starting an effort to collect and share data to help diversify the rank-and-file employees who make up tech companies.
“The standard mantra for every company on diversity statistics is, ‘We’re not doing well, but we’re working on it,’” said Pao, a former venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who sued the firm with accusations of gender discrimination and lost.
The group’s push is one of the more visible diversity efforts to come from women in Silicon Valley as tech companies grapple with criticism over the makeup of their workforces, which skew white and male.
Over the last few years, tech entrepreneurs like Kimberly Bryant of Black Girls Code and Laura Weidman Powers of Code 2040 have promoted the inclusion of young women and minorities in early computer science education programs with their startups.
Tracy Chou, a software engineer at Pinterest who is also a founding member of Project Include, has been one of the most vocal engineers concerning the lack of female peers.
Project Include’s other founders are Freada Kapor Klein, a partner at the Kapor Center and a longtime proponent of inclusion in tech, Susan Wu of the mobile payments startup Stripe, Y-Vonne Hutchinson of the diversity consulting firm ReadySet and Bethanye McKinney Blount, a former executive at Reddit.
In December, for instance, Michael Moritz, a partner at the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, made headlines when he said in an interview that his firm — which had no female investment partners — would focus on hiring women but would not “lower its standards” to do so.