Successful executives want to monitor the progress in diversity … – Estado

Successful Executives want to monitor advancement of diversity in technology

Ellen Pao has spent the past year drawing attention to the lack of diversity in the technology sector, a problem that she came to take the court. Erica Baker caused an uproar in Google last year, when he created a spreadsheet to inform employees their salaries, in order to highlight the pay gap between men and women who performed the same tasks. Laura Gómez founded a startup with the goal of improving the issue of diversity in the hiring process. Now, the three, along with five other women of Silicon Valley companies – such as Pinterest and Slack – launched the “Project Include” initiative to collect data that can help diversify the employees of technology companies

“the motto in all companies in the field of diversity is ‘we have not done right, but we are working on the subject,’” said Ellen Pao, Kleiner risk former capitalist Perkins Caufield & amp; Byers, who sued the company, accusing it of gender discrimination and lost the action.

The initiative of this group is one of the most visible starting from Silicon Valley women as technology companies are criticized the composition of its board, usually made up only of men and whites. In recent entrepreneurial years in the industry as Kimberly Bryant, Black Girls Code, and Laura Weidman, of the Code in 2040, have been promoting the inclusion of young women and minorities in teaching computer science.

The Project Include if It stands out because of the number of well-known women in the industry who have championed diversity and that now unite around the theme. Ellen Pao, for example, made news last year because of the lawsuit filed against Kleiner Perkins and his resignation as interim executive director of Reddit forum. Tracy Chou, Pinterest software engineer, also founder of Project Include, it has been one of the most combative engineers regarding the lack of female peers.

Other women who are part of the Project Include are braked Kapor Klein , a partner at Kapor Center, that battle for a long time in favor of including the sector; Susan Wu, the startup Stripe payment by phone; Y-Vonne Hutchinson, the Readyset consulting firm; and Bethanye McKinney Blount, a former executive of Reddit. All work in the Project Include out of their jobs in their free time.

Compact. The group plans to get a commitment of companies of technology which will make monitoring of their respective labor and share data with other startups. The work will focus on startups that employ 25-1000 people, hoping to encourage companies to reflect on the issue of equality. The project should also seek the participation of venture capital companies who advise and guide startups

The project’s goal is to have 18 companies in the first group.; some have signed up. The group will meet regularly for seven months to define and trace the specific method of calculation. At the end of that period will be published a series of results that show progress or not the initiative.

“If companies begin immediately to tackle the issue of diversity and inclusion, they need to act hastily later , which is much more complicated, “said Baker, former engineer of Google, who now works at Slack, messaging platform for business.

the group’s initiative aims to end the slow pace of change. Large companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft openly acknowledge their failures in this field and some have implemented programs with this approach, but, it seems, the opinions have not changed. “Despite an avalanche of detailed data to the contrary, the belief in persists meritocracy,” Kapor said.

Many of the women involved in the Project Include were already leading initiatives in diversity before collaborating on this project. In 2015, for example, Ellen Pao became a kind of magnet for women who have been deprived of their rights by gender inequality issues after the action it brought against Kleiner Perkins.