Over the past year, it's become somewhat fashionable for companies to publicize data about their employee diversity. The goal here is to draw attention to the long ignored issue of homogenous workplaces, and take the first step in building a representative workforce. While a transparent blog post with colorful pie charts isn't going to undo centuries of institutional hiring and sourcing biases, only when we start to understand the breadth and depth of a problem can we begin to solve it. While a handful of companies are doing their part in this regard, the numbers surrounding employee diversity, in particular that of women in software engineering, are largely and woefully under-reported.
Far before Google published diversity data, enterprising Pinterest Engineer Tracy Chou had a beat on the issue. Tracy took to Medium to point out the general lack of data surrounding women in tech, and how this lack of clarity presents a roadblock. She writes:
We’ve all set up our booths at the Grace Hopper career fair and we’re all trying to recruit the same talented young women, but really — there’s a bigger goal, to remove gender as the hidden (or sometimes not-so-hidden) discriminant in the tech industry. And we need to work together to make that happen, and it starts with having honest dialogues about how we’re actually doing, as an industry, to encourage women in computing. So where are the numbers?
Not content to merely shake a fist at the issue, Tracy went on to share numbers about Pinterest's female engineers, and then implored her contemporaries to do the same about their own organizations. Tracy set up a GitHub repository where contributors could submit data. Below, Tracy explains the criteria:
For the purposes of this project, I am counting "female engineers" as women who are writing or architecting software, and are in full-time roles. This generally does not include people just writing HTML/CSS (depending on the level of sophistication of the CSS being written), data scientists (depending on the split of work between doing analysis and building systems and reusable code), designers, PMs, sysadmins, etc. although the line can be blurry for people who are in mixed roles, like engineering managers who were formerly ICs and still contribute code -- use your judgment. Only full-timers please; no interns or contractors.
For the less repositorially inclined among us, the results are also tabulated in this Google Spreadsheet.
If your organization is listed, well done and consider updating your stats. If it's not, add in some data and do your part to quantify the tech gender gap.
