Pinterest has improved diversity numbers recently, but it still has some work to do.
"We've made some modest progress over the past year," co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Evan Sharp wrote in a blog post.
About 42 percent of the company's employees are women, up from 40 percent. About 36 percent of engineering interns are women, up from 32 percent, while female engineers hired out of school jumped from 28 percent to 33 percent.
"But we have more work to do to increase the number of employees from all underrepresented backgrounds," Sharp said.
Which is why Pinterest has set four specific goals for 2016:
- Increase hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30 percent female.
- Increase hiring rates for full-time engineers to 8 percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds (specifically the African American and Hispanic/Latino communities).
- Increase hiring rates for non-engineering roles to 12 percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
- Implement a Rooney Rule-type requirement where at least one person from an underrepresented background and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.
This will require the company to make some changes, like expanding the scope of universities from which it recruits. Sharp also announced an early identification intern program for freshman and sophomore students from underrepresented backgrounds.
The social network is also partnering with strategy firm Paradigm to launch Inclusion Labs, a new initiative beginning this fall, that will experiment with new ways to improve diversity.
"Paradigm is committed to improving the systems and processes that affect diversity at our client companies," Joelle Emerson, Paradigm CEO, said in a blog post. "More broadly, though, we're interested in designing and testing ideas that have potential to impact the tech industry at large."
The organizations have been working together for seven months, collecting demographic data and expanding their education network.
"By sharing these goals publicly, we're holding ourselves accountable to make meaningful changes to how we approach diversity at Pinterest," Sharp said. "Over time, we hope to help build an industry that is truly diverse, and by extension more inclusive, creative, and effective."
A number of tech companies have released their diversity numbers over the past year, but Pinterest got the ball rolling. Engineer Tracy Chou penned a blog post in 2013 that asked: "Where are the numbers?" Several months later, companies like Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon started revealing the demographic makeup of their firms, and the numbers were pretty white and pretty male. Since then, companies like Intel and Apple have pledged millions to boost diversity at their companies.
For more, see PCMag's review of Pinterest. Also check out How to Use Pinterest for Beginners and How to Be a Jerk on Pinterest, as well as PCMag's Pinterest boards.