The downtown San Francisco office where Tracy Chou codes for Pinterest has the frenetic buzz of a fast-growing company. Construction workers have recently knocked down the north wall, annexing a neighboring building. Clusters of empty Ikea tables have been pushed together, awaiting new employees. Last year the social-media company nearly doubled the number of engineers it employs, to 192. And thanks to Chou’s activism, it has been public about the number of them who are women: 29.
At 27, Chou has become a leading voice for women in the tech industry by using data to call attention to how few of them are employed as engineers. She is an accomplished coder who had already worked at Facebook, Google, and the question-and-answer site Quora before arriving at Pinterest. And nearly two years ago, she took the simple but provocative step of uploading a spreadsheet—to the code-sharing platform Github, naturally—that companies could use to make public the number of female engineers in their ranks. The goal: to identify the scope of the problem as a first step toward making a stronger commitment to address it.
Chou didn’t set out to be an activist. In the fall of 2013, she attended an annual gathering of female technologists called the Grace Hopper Celebration, where people were, as they often do, bemoaning the lack of women in the field. Chou decided to look at the data to see just how bad the problem really was. “When we’re building new products for the web, we always track and A/B test everything,” she says. “With workforce demographics there was no baseline.”
Chou made this point in a blog post last year on Medium. “The actual numbers I’ve seen and experienced in industry are far lower than anybody is willing to admit,” she wrote. “This means nobody is having honest conversations about the issue.” She included Pinterest’s statistics—at the time, 12 percent of the company’s engineers were female. Then she invited companies to report their numbers on her public spreadsheet.
The data started pouring in. First, the smaller startups reported. (Ad-tech startup Adzerk: one of five engineers!) Then larger startups like 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. Chou’s efforts put pressure on the larger, more established companies to make their data public as well. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have since released diversity reports. The numbers are not good, but that’s not the point. Chou has established a concrete way to measure progress.
Her activism may be gaining her attention, but Chou’s passion remains coding. The daughter of Silicon Valley computer scientists, she went to school in Mountain View, not far from the Googleplex. She attended Stanford (of around 50 people in one comp-sci class, three were women), interned at Facebook and Google, and completed a master’s degree in computer science in 2010. Her specialty was artificial intelligence and machine learning. At Stanford she had noticed the impact of gender on her academic work. “I felt earlier on in my course work when I wasn’t doing as well, the guys were very willing to help me figure out problem sets,” she says. “But when I started doing much better … people would get offended if I could figure things out faster than them.”
After graduation, Chou joined Quora, then in 2011 became one of the first 15 employees at Pinterest. Chou, who has a strong sense of fashion, was already using the product to pin things she wanted to buy, so she thought it could be a good business. Cofounder Ben Silberman was a friend and recruited her. “I had a long list of bugs I wanted to fix when I joined the company,” Chou says. “But it felt like a good experience, like there was really something there.”
At Pinterest, Chou has played a big role in engineering a rewrite of the company’s website and launching its mobile site. Currently, she helps lead 16 engineers working on ad products. (They call it the monetization team.) She’s also helping recruit more women. “Pinterest is the first place at which I felt like I was treated like an engineer and not a female engineer,” she says. She attributes that to Silberman’s commitment to building an inclusive culture. This summer, Pinterest will host its largest new-grad engineering class ever—21 of 57 interns will be women. “It’s still not enough,” Chou says. But at least the data is going in the right direction.
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