by Angela Guess
Megan Rose Dickey reports in TechCrunch, “The data science team over at home-sharing platform Airbnb was able to increase the overall ratio of female employees on its team from 15 percent to 30 percent in 2015, with 47 percent of its new hires being women. That didn’t happen by accident. After scaling its team in terms of hyper-growth over five years, Airbnb’s data science team found that only 10 percent of the new hires were women. That’s when it became clear that the team was not being mindful of diversity, Airbnb Head of Data Science Riley Newman told TechCrunch. So, coming into 2015, Newman and Airbnb Data Science Manager Elena Grewal started thinking more about gender diversity in data science. It was just one dimension of many aspects of diversity Airbnb especially wanted to become more mindful about, Newman said.”
Dickey goes on, “The team did this by analyzing the equal employment opportunity commission data in Airbnb’s recruiting tool, Greenhouse, to better understand the diversity of the team’s applicants. In that process, the team noticed that they were getting a lot of female applicants, but they weren’t converting those applicants into actual hires. ‘That said to us, unlike in other fields, it wasn’t that there are no women applying for the role. We have a significant number of women coming into our pipeline,’ Newman said. ‘We wanted to correct for an imbalance that occurred’.”
photo credit: Airbnb