Recent studies show that there is a dismal disparity in the tech world when it comes to hiring employee. Companies from Silicon Valley are finding ways to diversify their workforce and the latest one to do so is Pinterest, which took its inspiration from the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League to create its own diversity initiative.
According to Fortune, Pinterest has been transparent when it comes to publicizing its workforce statistics. The social media company said that it is making progress over the past years and it promised that it will improve its current numbers.
Pinterest posted on its official blog, "We think one reason it's been so hard to get numbers to change is that companies haven't stated specific goals. So today, we're doing something unprecedented - we're going on record with our hiring goals for 2015."
The company said that it had made improvements and currently 42 percent of its employees are female, an increase from previous year's 40 percent. In terms of female engineering interns, the company saw an increase of 36 percent compared to last year's 32 percent. Women engineers hire straight out of school also increased to 33 percent compared to last year's 28 percent.
As for the company's goal for 2016, it envisions to increase its female full-time engineer hiring rate to 30 percent. The company also targets to increase its hiring rate of full-time engineers coming from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
Currently, Pinterest's work force is composed of 49 percent from white ethnic background, 43 percent were Asian, two percent were Hispanic and one percent are African American.