Women band together to track tech diversity
SAN FRANCISCO — Ellen Pao spent the last few years spotlighting the technology industry’s lack of diversity, in court and beyond. Erica Baker caused a stir at Google when she started a spreadsheet last year for employees to share their salaries, highlighting the pay disparities between those of different genders doing the same job. Laura Gómez founded a startup focused on improving diversity in the hiring process.
Now, the three, along with five other prominent Silicon Valley women, are starting an effort to collect and share data to help diversify the rank-and-file employees at tech companies. The nonprofit venture, called Project Include, was unveiled Tuesday.
“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 for accusations of gender discrimination and lost. “People don’t learn anything from that. Can you tell us what are you actually doing?”
The group’s push is one of the more visible diver- sity 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.
Project Include stands out because of the number of well-known tech women in the group who have championed diversity. Pao, for one, was in the headlines last year for her court case against Kleiner Perkins, as well as her ouster as interim chief executive of Reddit. 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; 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.