In an effort to diversify their workforce, businesses are going beyond "blind" hiring...
Tracy Chou wrote a post on Medium in October 2013, challenging tech companies to tell the world what percentage of their software engineers were women. Surprisingly, it worked: Google, Apple, Facebook and others published their lopsided race and gender statistics, and Chou, then a Pinterest software engineer, became a face of the tech diversity movement. Pinterest positioned itself as a company working hard to hire more women as well as black and Latino workers. In 2015, the company made an unprecedented move: It published a set of diversity-focused hiring goals. It would strive to make 30 percent of its engineering hires women, and it would report on its progress in a year.
Sixteen months later, Pinterest retreated. Despite all its efforts, only 22 percent of its new engineers were women, and in response, the company lowered its goal for next year from 30 percent to 25 percent. It had hit and exceeded its targets in two other categories -- making 8 percent of its engineering hires under-represented ethnic minorities, for example. Pinterest said it missed its women in engineering goal because it focused on hiring more senior women, which takes longer. But its admission that it had missed its mark and would lower expectations was a disappointment. “Obviously we were all hoping it would be better and closer to 30 percent,” said Chou, who left the company in June. Pinterest's head of diversity, Candice Morgan, said the company sets goals that are challenging and that it thinks it has a 70 percent chance of reaching.
Pinterest’s big goal -- and its later retrenchment -- show how tech companies’ diversity ambitions can come with their own set of messes and challenges. In the two years since tech giants first revealed how most of their employees were white and Asian men, their diversity has only increased a few percentage points – or, in some cases, dropped. Most companies’ first response was to try to make their hiring processes more “blind”: stripping resumes of names and pictures, for example, to keep out information that might unintentionally bias an interviewer for or against a candidate.
Now, some companies want to do more than cover their eyes. It’s not enough to just publish demographic data and scrub names and pictures from resumes. Unlike other companies, Twitter and Pinterest set specific hiring goals. Facebook rewarded its recruiters extra for “diversity hires.” Microsoft is tying managers’ bonuses to their diversity hiring after the proportion of female workers fell for two consecutive years. Even small startups – like Penny, a four-person personal finance company in San Francisco that's the subject of the latest episode of Bloomberg's Decrypted podcast – are evaluating candidates on whether they bring a new perspective to the team, in addition to their technical skills. Some companies are embracing affirmative action hiring, even if they are careful to call it something else.
“I have quite a few clients saying, ‘We want to take it one step further,’ or saying, ‘Listen, we did the unconscious bias thing, and we didn’t get a lot out of it,’” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, a diversity consultant who works with startups and helped found Project Include, a group of diversity advocates who publish guides of best practices for companies. “It’s happening in a way that wasn’t happening last year.”
Hutchinson encourages companies to explore new tactics, but she also warns them to prepare for resistance. “Affirmative action gets a lot of blowback, but it was one of the most successful ways of getting people from under-represented groups into jobs and institutions they were excluded from,” Hutchinson said. She’s African-American, and she said affirmative action helped her mother get a federal government job. “I don’t think tech has embraced affirmative action because they’re really married to the idea of a meritocracy.”
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Tracy Chou wrote a post on Medium in October 2013, challenging tech companies to tell the world what percentage of their software engineers were women. Surprisingly, it worked: Google, Apple, Facebook and others published their lopsided race and gender statistics, and Chou, then a Pinterest software engineer, became a face of the tech diversity movement. Pinterest positioned itself as a company working hard to hire more women as well as black and Latino workers. In 2015, the company made an unprecedented move: It published a set of diversity-focused hiring goals. It would strive to make 30 percent of its engineering hires women, and it would report on its progress in a year.
Sixteen months later, Pinterest retreated. Despite all its efforts, only 22 percent of its new engineers were women, and in response, the company lowered its goal for next year from 30 percent to 25 percent. It had hit and exceeded its targets in two other categories -- making 8 percent of its engineering hires under-represented ethnic minorities, for example. Pinterest said it missed its women in engineering goal because it focused on hiring more senior women, which takes longer. But its admission that it had missed its mark and would lower expectations was a disappointment. “Obviously we were all hoping it would be better and closer to 30 percent,” said Chou, who left the company in June. Pinterest's head of diversity, Candice Morgan, said the company sets goals that are challenging and that it thinks it has a 70 percent chance of reaching.
Pinterest’s big goal -- and its later retrenchment -- show how tech companies’ diversity ambitions can come with their own set of messes and challenges. In the two years since tech giants first revealed how most of their employees were white and Asian men, their diversity has only increased a few percentage points – or, in some cases, dropped. Most companies’ first response was to try to make their hiring processes more “blind”: stripping resumes of names and pictures, for example, to keep out information that might unintentionally bias an interviewer for or against a candidate.
Now, some companies want to do more than cover their eyes. It’s not enough to just publish demographic data and scrub names and pictures from resumes. Unlike other companies, Twitter and Pinterest set specific hiring goals. Facebook rewarded its recruiters extra for “diversity hires.” Microsoft is tying managers’ bonuses to their diversity hiring after the proportion of female workers fell for two consecutive years. Even small startups – like Penny, a four-person personal finance company in San Francisco that's the subject of the latest episode of Bloomberg's Decrypted podcast – are evaluating candidates on whether they bring a new perspective to the team, in addition to their technical skills. Some companies are embracing affirmative action hiring, even if they are careful to call it something else.
“I have quite a few clients saying, ‘We want to take it one step further,’ or saying, ‘Listen, we did the unconscious bias thing, and we didn’t get a lot out of it,’” said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, a diversity consultant who works with startups and helped found Project Include, a group of diversity advocates who publish guides of best practices for companies. “It’s happening in a way that wasn’t happening last year.”
Hutchinson encourages companies to explore new tactics, but she also warns them to prepare for resistance. “Affirmative action gets a lot of blowback, but it was one of the most successful ways of getting people from under-represented groups into jobs and institutions they were excluded from,” Hutchinson said. She’s African-American, and she said affirmative action helped her mother get a federal government job. “I don’t think tech has embraced affirmative action because they’re really married to the idea of a meritocracy.”
Read full article here
