This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In 2013, Tracy Chou attended aconvention of female technologists where delegates were, as they often do, bemoaning the lack of women in the field. Being a software engineer, Chou decided to look at the data to see just how bad the problem really was. Unfortunately, there was no data. "When we're building new products for the web, we track and A/B test every-thing," she says. "But with workforce demographics there was no baseline."
Chou made this point in a post last year on blog-publishing platform Medium, in which she invited companies to report the number of female engineers they employ in a spreadsheet posted on the coder social network GitHub. First the smaller startups reported. (Ad-tech startup Adzerk: one of five engineers.) Then larger startups such as Etsy (19 of 149), Dropbox (26 of 275) and Airbnb (18 of 143) joined in. To date, more than 200 tech companies have self-reported, putting pressure on the larger, more established firms to do the same. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have since released diversity reports. The numbers are bad, but that's not the point. Chou has laid a foundation for measuring and improving the situation.
Her activism may be gaining her attention, but Chou's passion is coding. At Pinterest she played a big role in engineering a rewrite of the social network's website and launching its mobile site. As part of the monetisation team, she leads 16 engineers working on ad products. And she's recruiting more women. This summer, 21 of 57 software-engineering interns will be women. "It's still not enough," Chou says. But at least the data is going in the right direction.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
