Multiple companies are releasing their workforce statistics and Pinterest’s ‘Inclusion Labs’ wants more diversity in order to boost their numbers for 2016. It’s no secret, given the statistics, that the tech industry is generally dominated by white men, with 85% of the employees worldwide being male.
Major companies, such as Google, Apple or Facebook, have voiced out their intention on diversifying their numbers on both gender and ethnic levels. Pinterest is the latest to join onto the movement, by partnering up with Paradigm and launching their ‘Inclusion Labs’ project.
The plan to boost diversity within Pinterest’s ranks implies training against unconscious bias, similar to Facebook’s video to promote the same message, data collection, company culture and diversity recruitment. The picture sharing website has already been praised for their percentages so far, but it’s planning on taking it a step forward.
Pinterest currently has over 600 employees, it’s valued at $11 billion and has recently received $1.3 billion in funding which they hope to put to good use. And so far, the company has seen “modest progress” that is still impressive in a mostly male dominated industry.
The released statistics for 2015 show that while women make up for 42% of Pinterest’s workforce, 66% of them are hired for non-tech jobs, with the engineering and leadership positions largely still dominated by men. And, more specifically, 49% of the male employees are white and 43% Asian.
It set the stage for their future plans and the company has released their goals for next year: to improve their diversity. The intention is to increase the numbers in the engineering department to be made up of 30% women and 8% to be from minorities and underrepresented ethnicities. It also plans on 12% of its future non-tech employees to be hired from similar ethnic backgrounds.
Starting now, Pinterest will not only encourage, but require their managers to interview at least one woman and one person of an underrepresented ethnicity for leadership positions. Now that they have discovered the problem, all that remains is finding the reason why and how to fix it.
So, the company will make efforts to launch an “early identification inter program” by recruiting freshmen and sophomores from a wider range of universities and ethnic backgrounds.
It will also require its current employees to participate in the Pinterest and Paradigm’s unconscious bias training that will hopefully help improve their diversity numbers and avoid issues bred by cultural differences.
Pinterest has full intention on ‘pinning’ more women and underrepresented ethnicities in their engineering and leadership positions, and hope that the rest of the tech industry will follow suit.
Image source: thenextweb.com
