#GAReads | Silicon Valley engineer Tracy Chou: Stop saying that diversity means lowering the bar
photo credit: Steve Jennings [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
"Silicon Valley engineer Tracy Chou: Stop saying that diversity means lowering the bar":
For a young person starting out in tech, an internship at Google or Facebook should be like winning the lottery. But from the moment software engineer Tracy Chou set foot in the offices of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, she felt deeply uncomfortable being a woman in a sea of white men. One male coworker “offered to give me a massage ‘because I looked stressed,'” she wrote in an essay for Quartz. “Another tried to get me to watch a movie with him in a dark room with the door locked and blinds closed.”
Such experiences prompted Chou to become one of tech’s most prominent—and passionate—diversity advocates. In 2016, she co-founded Project Include, a nonprofit helmed by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, that uses data to help tech companies bring on more diverse employees.