In an announcement made on July 30th, 2015, Pinterest released their diversity goals for the upcoming year, in an attempt to hold themselves accountable on the new changes.
The photo sharing website broke the ice in the industry by publicly posting their diversity goals on their blog. They explained the positive step as an effort to address the important issue of diversity that plagues the tech industry.
While many other companies out there have taken small steps in tackling the problem, Pinterest is the first to take the matter in their hands and display a pro active attitude. Admitting there has been an increase in the company’s female employees number in 2014, Pinterest still wants to take on even more responsibility and set even higher goals.
Pinterest also formally undertook the task of increasing the percentage of underrepresented ethnic backgrounds among its employees.
How does Pinterest intend to put its plan into execution? They’re thinking of expanding the number of universities they use for recruiting and even launch an internship program aimed at first and second years.
What is more, Pinterest will take another measure by teaming up with Paradigm and encouraging the implementation of a training and mentorship program. They are also considering starting some “inclusion labs” on the premises in order to find new improvement ways towards their goals.
One of Pinterest’s four diversity goals is entirely dedicated to implementing a Rooney rule-type condition according to which at least one person pertaining to a minority background and one female candidate are interviewed for each leadership position available.
Pinterest’s continuous efforts in fighting for tech diversity, are sustained by engineer Tracy Chou. Through a blog post from 2013 she required tech companies to publicly release the hard data they have on diversity, estimating the actual numbers will be lower than anyone wanted to admit.
And she was right. As a consequence, tech companies started sharing the data and even Google opened up. According to their 2015 report, only 30% of jobs at Google are owned by women.
What else is on Pinterest’s agenda? They want to pump up the total number hiring rate for full time engineers to eight percent. They also plan on boosting their hiring rates for every non engineering role to twelve percent.
The five year old company currently has around five hundred employees and over 83 percent of the global users are women who plan their vacations, look for do it yourselves, and find inspiration for their weddings. Pinterest doesn’t display ads, but companies can display their products on pinboards.
Deborah Campbell
