Now Arjuna Capital, a Massachusetts-based investment firm that specializes in sustainability, is pushing other big tech companies to follow in Intel’s footsteps. It’s challenging seven tech companies—eBay, Amazon, Expedia, Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and Facebook—to set goals to achieve gender equality in the workplace.
Blendoor is a mobile job matching app that hides candidate name and photo to circumvent unconscious bias and facilitate diversity recruiting in tech companies. Studies have shown that two identical resumes with only a name difference (i.e., Joe to Jose) can yield 100% difference in the response rate. Our goal is to highlight the information that’s most relevant to a candidate being a “good fit” independent of race, gender, ability, military history or sexual orientation.
Congratulations to the 11 founding partners of #pledgePL in the USA: Ustwo, Veryday, Made by Many, IDEO, Doberman, Moment, Co: Collective, Betaworks, Dots, Wolff Olins, Smart Design. If you’re in the US, get your company to join! Lots of useful resources on the site.
Created as a unified voice and proverbial line in the sand, Pledge Parental Leave sets the standard for the minimum parental leave benefits companies in the creative industry (and beyond) should be offering their team.
By adhering to these four criteria, each Pledge Partner has announced (and proved) to the world that they truly do care about the well-being of their employees, and their families.
Padmasree Warrior, U.S. chief executive of electric auto startup NextEV Inc., said she asks her recruiting team daily for a list of diverse candidates. Now her team tells her who the candidates are without her needing to ask, she said.
Facebook Inc. and Pinterest Inc. have tried out an approach known as the Rooney Rule, which requires that at least one woman or underrepresented minority be interviewed for open jobs. The Rooney rule was born in the National Football League as a way to ensure that teams interviewed minority candidates for head-coaching jobs.
Cisco is ensuring that job candidates encounter at least one interviewer of their same gender or ethnicity, a practice that has resulted in a roughly 50% increase in the odds a woman will be hired for a given position, said Ruba Borno, a Cisco vice president and chief of staff to Chief Executive Chuck Robbins.
I saw an interesting study that was done on — they used a VR experience where, at the end of it, the women who experienced it rated lower on self-criticism. It’s fascinating, because I remember being a young woman and being very insecure and hearing people say, “Well, you need to find some self-esteem.” And having absolutely no idea how to do that. If I could have put on a device and found some self-esteem I would have paid for that. [laughs] It’s tremendously powerful. We should be pushing the limits and exploring what it can do for people. That requires diversity.
Google is implementing blind code interviews where the code is viewed only by the hiring manager in the initial phase.
If you’re a woman aged 18+ in the UK, please take the What Women Want 2.0 Survey. Ada’s List is a proud partner.
Launched on International Women’s Day and running throughout the spring and summer of 2016, our goal is to reach over one million responses to the question “What do you want?”
The results will form the largest ever showcase of women’s needs, wants and attitudes and will be used by our partners to make change happen.
Details and link to the survey here. The original survey was done in 1996 so this is the 20th anniversary of the survey, and a good time to look back on what’s changed and see what needs to for the future.
On Tuesday, the online retailer Etsy became the latest tech company to offer an extremely generous (at least by U.S. standards) parental-leave policy. Starting this April, new mothers and fathers at the company will be able to take 26 weeks of paid leave (eight weeks immediately following birth and 18 more that can be spread out over two years). Previously, the company gave its U.S. employees 12 weeks of maternity leave or five weeks of paternity leave.
This is great. More power to Etsy and their tribe.
Although there’s no data to prove it, Miller and Effron both suspect that this effect impacts the way companies go about short-listing candidates for positions. If companies put together a diverse short list, they may feel as if they’ve fulfilled their moral obligations and allow their unconscious biases to guide them toward hiring another white guy.
This slowdown in women’s representation shows that diversity efforts must be constantly reinforced after initial successes, and that gains can be fleeting in an industry that still retains considerable institutional bias in favor of white and Asian males. “Small improvements are better than no improvements, but even if the growth rate is slowing down, that’s an important signal to us that we need to try even more new things to address it,” said Aubrey Blanche, the global head of diversity and inclusion at Atlassian, a business software firm.
