DROPBOX ADDS ‘FIREPOWER’ TO ZERO IN ON DIVERSITY GOALS
Company has had gains — and setbacks — since 2014 report
Sitting in a conference room in his company’s San Francisco headquarters, Drew Houston, 32, recalls a question he was asked during a recent visit to his alma mater, MIT: Why is diversity important to Dropbox and to the tech industry at large?
“Look at your classroom,” he says he told the group of diverse students. “Imagine how different this room would have been 50 years ago, all the talent that has been unlocked since then and how much better we are because of that. That’s what all of our companies have the opportunity to do.”
The chief executive of Dropbox is getting a lot more questions about diversity these days. He set aside an hour to discuss with USA TODAY his push to improve the gender and racial diversity of his 1,500-person company’s workforce and the inclusiveness of its corporate culture. All around him is evidence of the lopsided demographics bedeviling Dropbox and other Silicon Valley companies: The employees are mostly white and Asian men.
Houston is one of the rare tech CEOs to stake his leadership on challenging ingrained attitudes and practices inside the industry and his own company to change those demographics.
He and Arash Ferdowsi, the chief technology officer who founded the online storage and collaboration company with him, want Dropbox to better reflect the available workforce and their customers around the globe. And they have a new co-pilot in their endeavor: Judith Williams, Dropbox’s first global diversity chief, whom they hired from Google.
Dropbox, a 9-year-old privately held start-up valued at $10 billion, is stronger for the preliminary steps it has taken, he says.
“It has always been important to me and to Arash to create a company with a diverse team and where everyone feels welcome,” Houston said. “We have put a lot of work into being intentional.”
Dropbox, like other companies, has a long way to go. Its newly released diversity numbers show some modest gains and some setbacks from the last diversity report card it released in November 2014. In the plus column for 2015, the share of women in technical roles rose 46% to 19% from 13%. Women now hold 21% of senior leadership roles and a quarter of vice president roles.
Dropbox also boosted the share of African Americans in the company to 2% from 1% and Hispanics to 5% from 3.7%. It also saw a slight increase in representation in technical roles: African Americans (1% from 0.3%) and Hispanics (3% from 2%). But, Dropbox concedes, it started from a very low base.
Other numbers, Houston says, are going in the wrong direction. Last year, women accounted for about a third — 33.9% — of the Dropbox workforce and nearly 50% of non-technical positions. This year, women accounted for 32% of the workforce and 44% of non-technical positions.
Dropbox will focus on these areas in 2016, Houston says, and with more “firepower” from Williams.
The former global diversity and inclusion programs manager at Google, Williams was instrumental in the Internet giant’s widely praised unconscious bias training program that was the first to call out hidden prejudices as a major contributor to the systemic lack of diversity in the tech industry. She expanded the training to Hollywood, where she addressed unconscious gender bias in the entertainment industry and led a training for J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot productions crew before filming Star Wars:
The Force Awakens.
Three months into the new job, Williams says her strategy falls into three categories: increase the pipeline of women and underrepresented minorities, create a more inclusive corporate culture and form deep ties to the communities in which Dropbox operates. “Having those three focus areas gives people in the company a lot of different ways to enter into our diversity conversation,” she says.
“It has always been important to me ... to create a company with a diverse team and where everyone feels welcome.”
Drew Houston, Dropbox CEO