Pinterest's Diversity Numbers Are Almost As Bad As The Rest Of The Tech Sector

Pinterest disclosed its company's diversity statistics Wednesday, following a pattern of other tech giants releasing their own diversity numbers.

Similar to Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, Pinterest's employees are predominantly white. However, Pinterest is 40% female and 60% male. While that's not ideal, it's very slightly better than the female-to-male ratio reported by other tech companies.

The company has a lot of work to do in terms of race. Pinterest reported 50% of its company is white, 42% Asian, 2% Hispanic, 1% African American, and 5% "other." This is pretty much on par with the equally subpar ethnicity breakdowns from other tech companies.

The diversity number disclosure comes almost a year after Tracy Chou, a Pinterest software engineer and tech lead, wrote a post on Medium called "Where Are The Numbers?," calling for the tech industry to share its diversity metrics.

"While we've made some progress in diversifying gender at the company, we haven't done as well in representing different ethnicities, and we're focused on getting better," Chou said on Pinterest's blog. "As we look ahead, we've put particular effort on inclusion efforts in hiring earlier in the engineering pipeline, recruiting a 29% female inaugural engineering intern class last year and 32% female this year."

This wave of tech companies divulging their diversity numbers is a result of a diversity initiative led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Since early 2014, he's called on the tech sector to improve its diversity statistics.