By Rachel Williams, Gauri Subramani, Michael Luca & Geoff Donaker
Beginning in 2013, a handful of tech companies (including Yelp, where some of us work, Google, LinkedIn and Facebook) began to research and release data on the diversity of their work forces.
The numbers were grim. For instance, in 2014 only 10 percent of Yelp’s engineers were female. Seven percent of Yelp employees were Hispanic and 4 percent were black.
Leaders at Yelp wanted things to change for two main reasons. First, only by bringing in candidates of all backgrounds could Yelp really make sure it was hiring the best and brightest. After all, a company that excludes women and minorities is accessing less than 40 percent of the labor pool. Second, having a diverse set of employees would help Yelp to customize its services for its diverse set of users.
Fast forward to 2017, and things are improving. The percentage of technical positions filled by women at Yelp in the United States has increased from 10 percent to 18 percent. Across the company, 10 percent of employees are Hispanic and 6 percent are black. Yelp now sets explicit targets for diversity. These goals include aiming for Yelp’s sales teams to match the composition of the diverse communities in which they operate, increasing its proportion of female engineers and making its culture more inclusive.
Yelp’s approach to improving on diversity has involved piloting a variety of strategies, and we are now analyzing the data. After scouring academic research and industry reports, leaders at Yelp brainstormed tactics to try, including varying the gender composition of hiring committees, masking voices during phone-interview screening and expanding on-campus recruiting efforts to include selected historically black universities, women’s colleges and schools with higher proportions of Hispanic students.
Increasing diversity at tech companies isn’t about finding a silver bullet. It’s about following a systematic process, involving two important steps that are too often lacking in practice.
First, companies should be as transparent as possible, not only about the problem but also about their experiences and obstacles. Both internally and publicly, companies need to share the things they have tried, the things that have worked and just as important, the things that have failed.
Second, companies should be more proactive about rigorously evaluating the policies they implement, using experiments or other causal inference approaches.
Currently, too many approaches are based on intuition, anecdotes and evidence from contexts that don’t directly map to the tech industry.
Rachel Williams is the head of corporate recruiting, diversity and inclusion at Yelp. Gauri Subramani is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Michael Luca is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Geoff Donaker was the COOof Yelp from 2005 to 2016.