Part two: Data

I think the data is the first step because it helps us to understand where we are and also where we can get to and if we're making any progress towards that. Right now, there's much more of a focus on overall employee demographics. And so if you look at the diversity of data reports coming out of most tech companies, they'll have pretty broad cuts looking at technical, non-technical staff and gender breakdowns and racial breakdowns, but not necessarily looking at the intersections of those or tracking things over time and looking at things like promotion rates or retention rates. That can pose certain problems if you're doing a great job on recruiting more diverse talent in but not actually having a very inclusive environment. And so the people that you bring in from underrepresented backgrounds end up cycling out much more quickly or not advancing. That's still quite a big problem. We have a medium publication for Project Include where we've documented a lot of what we're working on. We release the first report about sort of include in that cohort of companies. One thing that's very cool about the startup include cohort is that we can collect data across all of them and aggregate those stats and publish them as benchmarks. Who's represented? Are we actually collecting that data? Who's leaving more often and why? I think the first step is always collect as much data as you can, and you'll start to see where the gaps are. For our first year, we set our goals around hiring underrepresented minorities at a really high rate, rather than sort of examining the way our culture was going to be supportive of them. So we just didn't hit the hiring targets that we set, which is fine. But we recognize stepping back, that making more proactive investments in those communities before sort of reaching out and offering roles and things like that has been much more successful. So building really deep, authentic connections. And it turns out that the recruiting numbers begin to follow their sort of proactive long-term investments. One indicator as to whether company is really focused on diversity and inclusion is just their numbers. If there's no diversity amongst the board or in company executive leadership or management throughout, that often indicates that the environment is not truly supportive of diversity and inclusion. It's very hard to tell when there is discrimination or bias when you only have the single data point of yourself. I've never changed companies or teams explicitly just for reasons around diversity and inclusion. And some of that is because I wasn't that aware of all the dynamics at play there. With a few team changes that I made at Pinterest, for example, I opted to go to teams that were already close to 50% female, and it was actually fantastic to join those teams, those already women there, some in leadership roles. Gender was never in question there. And there is some research that points to the actual percentage of an underrepresented group you need to get to, let's say, like 30% or let's say three people on a team where each woman can now stand individually. And I felt that with some of the teams I've been on when there were three or four women, and we could each be our own person and not be expected to represent our entire gender or have to deal with these strange dynamics when there were so few of us.