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A group of influential women in the tech industry on Tuesday launched a tool to better measure and increase diversity in technology, an area where they say not enough progress has been made.
ProjectInclude.orghas recommendations of how technology and venture-capital firms can hire, retain and promote staff members with diverse backgrounds and update their human resources practices.
“There are a lot of companies we think are interested in improving their diversity numbers but aren’t doing it in a way we think is going to work,” said Ellen Pao, one of the group members, who last year lost ahigh-profile gender discrimination suitagainst her former employer, venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
In the past two years, many tech firms including Google parent company Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc. have begun publishing diversity reports showing how few employees are women or underrepresented minorities.Venture-capital firms have even fewer women and minoritiesthan the broader tech industry.
Yet, the new transparency hasn't resulted in markedly more of these profiles. Apple Inc. in January said the share of its employees who are black, Asian or Hispanic had increased just slightly from the previous year, and women made up a smaller percentage of the company’s U.S. managers.
Though companies such as Intel Corp. have allocated big budgets to diversifying staff, many firms say there aren’t enough women and minorities to hire.
Most diversity initiatives in the tech industry have focused on hiring, not retaining the underrepresented groups.
Project Include focuses on the entire life cycle of employees at a company, building diversity into all aspects of its culture.
This includes recruiting from a broad range of sources, establishing a transparent framework for salary and compensation, making training ongoing during an employee’s first year and hiring managers who are committed to diversity.
It also recommends venture-capital firms track the diversity at the startups they have invested in or are considering investing in.
The guidelines come from academic research as well as the experiences of the eight women creators, including Ms. Pao, who was also interim chief executive of Reddit, Freada Kapor Klein, partner at Kapor Capital, a venture-capital firm, and Erica Baker, senior engineer at Slack Technologies Inc., whostarted a spreadsheet for employees to share salary informationwhen she was working at Google.
The project began over dinners and coffees when the women realized they had shared similar experiences with lack of diversity at the various tech firms they had worked. When one person brought up many of the challenges she faced, the others would say they too had similar experience.
“We realized there had been enough mistakes in our combined careers that we wanted to help startups avoid these kinds of mistakes,” saysbethanye Blount, chief executive of Cathy Labs.
The eight tech veterans started working on their site in December.
“We’ve very intentionally laid the groundwork for building a long lasting community, one founded on open-source principles, where the most innovative solutions for diversity and inclusion might very well come from anyone, anywhere,” saidSusan Wu,head of Australia and New Zealand for online payments startup Stripe Inc.
The women hope companies will sign up to create a community of firms interested in increasing diversity and can contribute new ideas for diversity initiatives.
(THE WALL STREET JOURNAL)
