User:Vipul/Tracy Chou

Tracy Chou is a software engineer currently working at Pinterest. She has prior work experience at Quora and internship experience at Rocket Fuel, Google, and Facebook.

She is most famous for raising the profile of the issue of the low representation of women in technology companies, and pressuring companies to reveal more statistics about the composition of their workforce.

Biography
Chou, a daughter of computer scientists based in Silicon Valley, went to school in Mountain View and studied computer science at Stanford University with a specialization in machine learning and artificial intelligence. While studying at Stanford, she interned at Google, Facebook, and Rocket Fuel.

Describing her experience as an undergraduate, Chou said that she found her male classmates were helpful and supportive when she was struggling with the material but were less cooperative once she started becoming better at the work than her peers. She also noted that her male colleagues would be more likely to frame their performance in terms more favorable to them, and it took her time to figure out that she was actually doing a lot better in the courses than her much more confident male colleagues.

Even though she was studying computer science and enjoyed programming, Chou did not seriously consider programming as a full-time job. Even after an internship as a programmer at Facebook, she wasn't considering becoming a software engineer and instead hoped to get her doctorate to do quantitative marketing research. However, in 2010, a small startup called Quora approached her and convinced her to give it a shot. She joined Quora, but left in October 2011 to join Pinterest, becoming one of the first 15 employees at the then fledgeling pinboard company.

In February 2015, Chou signed on as a consultant for the United States Digital Service, a consortium of technology practitioners trying to make government in the United States more efficient.

Activism
In October 2013, Chou attended an annual gathering of female technologists called the Grace Hopper Celebration, where she became curious about the issue of female representation in technology companies, and decided to gather data to shed light on the issue. This led her to write a blog post urging technology companies to disclose the number of women working at the company. Chou has argued that releasing data to quantify a problem is a first step to finding constructive solutions. To facilitate sharing of the responses she received, Chou set up a repository on code-sharing site Github and invited everybody to participate. Within a week, the repository had statistics on over 50 firms, and by August 2015, it had statistics on 200 firms. Chou's focus on the issue is also credited with pressuring larger companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to release diversity reports. In July 2014, Chou published an update on Pinterest's engineering blog describing the company's progress so far on diversity and inclusion.

Chou has identified a number of possible reasons for the disparity in representation of women in tech. She has argued that if nobody suggests to a woman that a career as a software engineer is a realistic possibility, she is less likely to consider it. She also thinks that networking opportunities and role models are more limited for women and minorities. Chou has also encountered many instances of mansplaining in the tech sector, such as when a man she met at a tech conference confidently talked over her about a Quora feature that had been built while she worked at the company. She has also commented on the fact that women who look very feminine tend to get ignored in tech settings.

In late July 2015, Pinterest, where Chou has worked since October 2011, launched a diversity project, setting goals for itself to hire more women and minorities, and committing itself to publicly disclose its progress toward these goals and any obstacles it ran into. Chou's pioneering role in highlighting the issue has been credited as a reason for the initiative. The initiative received praise from Jesse Jackson.