Pinterest's diversity report is as bad as that of the rest of tech companies

Jul 25, 2014 09:56 GMT  ·  By

For a while now, companies have started to reveal just how they stand for diversity in the workplace. The results were, not surprisingly, completely disappointing, not for a single company, but for the entire tech industry.

Pinterest joins the list today, with a predictable men-preponderant. 60 percent of the company’s employees are men, while 81 percent of leadership jobs are occupied by the same gender. The business-related departments are the only ones that are mostly composed of females, namely 66 percent.

In the tech department, as well as among the tech interns, men continue to lead the chart with 79 percent and 68 percent, respectively.

When it comes to ethnicity ratios, Pinterest isn’t doing any better than other companies in the tech industry. 50 percent of the people working for the company are Caucasian, while 42 percent are Asian. Only 2 percent of Pinterest's employees are Hispanic and 1 percent African American. The rest of 5 percent are under the “Other” category.

Tracy Chou, a software engineer and tech leader at Pinterest, admits that the company isn’t close to where it wants to be, but promises that they’re working on it; an answer we heard quite a bit in the last few months.

“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. Beyond hiring, we’re mindful of processes and practices that may affect success and retention of employees coming from less represented backgrounds,” Chou writes.

She adds that they’re partnering with organizations that are effecting real change, such as Girls Who Code, CODE2040, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Anita Borg Institute, Hackbright Academy, and Out for Undergrad.

The company says that it wants to help people from all over the world live inspired lives, regardless of their background and situation.

“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,” Chou adds.

The platform has a considerably large pool of female users. In fact, a recent study from RJMetrics shows that 92 percent of all pins are posted by women. Out of the over 70 million users of Pinterest, 80 percent are women, which is in contrast with the way the company is built.

Pinterest's disappointing stats
Pinterest's disappointing stats

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Pinterest's work diversity is bad
Pinterest's disappointing stats
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