SAN FRANCISCO — Pinterest, like other Silicon Valley tech firms, has struggled to make its workforce more diverse this year, but when the company released diversity data Thursday it did something outside the norm — it publicly set goals for 2016.
“Pinterest’s approach stands in stark contrast — combining aspiration with concrete measurable intention, and is one that other companies would do well to emulate,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, president and founder of Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a social justice organization, said in a statement.
About 42 percent of Pinterest’s workforce this year are women, up slightly from 40 percent in 2014. But of employees who work in technical roles and engineering — 79 percent and 81 percent, respectively — are men.
Overall, the percentage of black, Hispanic, white, Asian and other employees was relatively the same compared to last year. Whites make up 49 percent of the total workforce and Asians account for 43 percent of workers.
“By sharing these goals publicly, we’re holding ourselves accountable to make meaningful changes to how we approach diversity at Pinterest,” said Evan Sharp, co-founder of the photo-collecting site in a blog post on Thursday. “We’ll also be sharing what’s working and what isn’t as we go, so hopefully other companies can learn along with us.”
According to the post, Pinterest’s goals for 2016 include:
-Increasing hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30 percent female.
-Increasing hiring rates for full-time engineers to 8 percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
-Increasing hiring rates for non-engineering roles to 12 percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
-Implementing a Rooney Rule-type requirement where at least one person from an underrepresented background and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.
Sharp wrote that they planned to hit those goals by expanding university recruiting, partnering with the strategy firm Paradigm to set up a lab to experiment with new ways to improve diversity, getting all employees to participate in unconscious bias training and pledging to help black software engineers and students.
With diversity numbers barely budging this year at other tech firms, civil rights activists have been calling on tech firms including Facebook and Google to set more measurable targets for diversifying the workforce.
They’ve praised Intel, which announced this year that the company was investing $300 million to hire and retain minorities and women, pledged to increase diversity by 2020 and said it would tie executive compensation to these goals.
On Thursday, they did the same for Pinterest.
“We have said ‘if you don’t measure it, you don’t mean it.’ Clearly, Pinterest means it,” Jackson said in his statement.
Contact Queenie Wong at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/QwongSJ.
