Tracy Chou is taking on the Silicon Valley gender gap.
And she's winning.
Chou is a 27-year-old software developer at Pinterest, where since she began, the number of female software developers has increased by "5 percent in one year," according to the Age, to an 83 percent male to 17 percent female ratio at the company.
That might not sound like a lot, but in an industry where only 15.29 percent of coders are women, and many Silicon Valley firms have far fewer women doing key work than that, it's not an insigificant achievement.
Chou is personally helping to bridge the gap by visiting universities and encouraging women with computer science degrees and coding chops to join the firm. Pinterest's most recent intern class was 29 percent women, and "three of those were hired full-time as engineers."
So it's getting better, but big firms are still lagging behind even the paltry 15.29 percent average. Airbnb, Dropbox, Wikimedia and Foursquare all have women percentages below the average. Even Change.org needs to change in order to become even averagely equal.
It's a tough road for women from the onset, The Age notes: women coders are outliers in computer science classes and can feel left out and isolated on the road from class to work.
Tech
Many companies have declined to present numbers of engineers who are women at their firms. The list of deniers includes Appel, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, The Age reported.
