Pinterest vows to boost workforce diversity

Companies have increasingly detailed their workforce diversity numbers — we've seen them from Facebook, Google, and more. Some companies have more favorable numbers than others, but most of them are paltry at best, and progress is slow. Pinterest has pointed toward that slow progress, and today announced detailed plans and timelines for increasing its own workforce diversity. Pinterest is perhaps the first tech company to detail such precise hiring goals, which includes several improvements targeted for 2016 and more for beyond.

Pinterest's co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Evan Sharp talked about the diversity plans today, saying the company will go on record about its diversity plans — in that in 2016 it plans to increase the number of women and individuals of "ethnic backgrounds" it hires, as well as giving at least one woman and one person from an underrepresented group an interview for all leadership positions that open up.

Pinterest plans to increase its number of full time female engineers to 30-percent in 2016, and its number of full time engineers from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds to 8-percent next year. Finally, it also plans to increase the number of non-engineering workers it has from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds to 12-percent.

The company also went ahead and detailed how it plans to go about meeting these goes, of which it plans to expand the number of universities from which it recruits, form an "early identification intern program", work with strategy firm Paradigm to carry out diversity experiments, issue training to help its existing workers avoid "unconscious bias", and support the development of a mentorship and training program that will "maximize the impact of Black software engineers and students."

SOURCE: Pinterest