Diversity in Tech: Pinterest Shows Lack of Hispanics, but Progress for Women
Pinterest joins the latest round of tech firms reporting diversity figures in an attempt to shed some light on the makeup of Silicon Valley's workforce. The figures? The company's report shows there are barely any Hispanics, but more women than rivals.
Official Pinterest workforce numbers reveal that only 2 percent of the company's employees are classified as Hispanic. However, 50 percent of the total company are Caucasian and 42 percent are Asian. "Others" make up 5 percent, and African Americans come in last, composing only 1 percent of Pinterest.
In a post on the official Pinterest engineering blog, software engineer and tech lead Tracy Chou said, "We're not close to where we want to be, but we're working on it."
"Our vision is to help people live inspired lives -- people across the world, from all walks of life," she added. "We only stand to improve the quality and impact of our products if the people building them are representative of the user base and reflect the same diversity of demography, culture, life experiences and interests that makes our community so vibrant."
The image-based social network does edge out fellow like-minded firms when it comes to the gender makeup, however. According to Pinterest data, women make up 40 percent of the company's workforce, a number that puts it ahead of Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, which all hover around 30 percent when it comes to females in the workplace. Pinterest also revealed that women make up 19 percent of leadership roles, 66 percent of business roles, 21 percent of tech roles, and 32 percent of the tech interns.
"As we look ahead, we've put particular focus on inclusion efforts in hiring earlier in the engineering pipeline, recruiting a 29% female inaugural engineering intern class last year and 32% female this year," Chou said. "Beyond hiring, we're mindful of processes and practices that may affect success and retention of employees coming from less represented backgrounds."
Pinterest's diversity report comes amidst a call for more inclusion in tech workplaces that have come to be dominated by white men and Asian men. Unlike many of the other companies that have recently come out with diversity reports, however, Pinterest is still a private company, not subject to certain scrutines that come with going public. Still, Pinterest seems to reiterate a similar theme: that they are trying harder to change the bro-driven, jockey mindset of Silicon Valley that has started comparisons to Wall Street run amuck.
Pinterest is also involved in Collaborating with Girls Who Code, CODE2040, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Anita Borg Institute, Hackbright Academy, and Out for Undergrad while helping out with the documentary "CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap."
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