Tracy Chou (software engineer)

Last updated
Tracy Chou
Tracy Chou TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019.jpeg
Chou in 2019
Born1987 (age 36–37)
United States
Education Stanford University (BS, MS) [1]
Occupation Software engineer

Tracy Chou (born 1987) [2] [3] is an American software engineer and advocate for diversity in technology related fields. She previously worked at Pinterest and Quora with internship experience at Google and Facebook. [4]

Contents

She is best known 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. [5] [6] [7] In 2016, she co-founded the advocacy group Project Include with seven other women from the industry. [8] In 2022, she was named one of Time's 12 Women of the Year. [9]

Early life and education

Chou is a daughter of Taiwanese computer scientists based in Silicon Valley who immigrated from Taiwan. [7] [10] She attended St. Francis High School in Mountain View.

Chou studied computer science at Stanford University with a specialization in machine learning and artificial intelligence. [4] During that time, she interned at Google and Facebook, and went on to receive a master's degree in computer science. Describing her undergraduate experience studying computer science, Chou said she felt, "really out of place" and less confident than her male colleagues at the beginning and took time to realize that she was outperforming most of them in coursework. [6]

Career

Though she was studying computer science and enjoyed programming, she did not seriously consider programming as a full-time job. Even after an internship as a programmer at Facebook, she was not considering becoming a software engineer and instead hoped to get her doctorate to do quantitative marketing research. However, in 2010, Quora, which was then a small startup, approached her and convinced her to start working as an engineer there. She joined Quora as the company's fourth employee, but left in October 2011 to join Pinterest, becoming one of the first 15 employees at the then-fledgling pinboard company. [4] [11]

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. [12] In August 2015, TechCrunch reported that Chou was a featured maker at Makerbase, a service that "make[s] it easier for anyone to discover who built some of the most popular websites and apps people use every day." [13]

In December 2018, Chou became the CEO and founder of Block Party, "a consumer app that tackles online harassment and puts you back in control." [14] In 2020, the company pivoted to privacy after losing access to Twitter's API. [15]

Activism

Chou at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 TechCrunch TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 - Day 3 Tracy Chou.jpeg
Chou at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019

In October 2013, Chou attended the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, where she became curious about the issue of female representation in technology companies, and decided to gather data to assess the severity of the issue. This led her to write a blog post urging technology companies to disclose the numbers of women they had in technical roles. [4] [6] [7] [16] To facilitate sharing of the responses she received, Chou set up a repository on code-sharing site GitHub which allows anyone to submit a pull request. Within a week, the repository had statistics on over 50 firms, and by January 2016, it had statistics on 250 firms. [6] [17] Chou's focus on the issue is also credited with pressuring larger companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft to release diversity reports. [4] In July 2014, Chou published an update on Pinterest's engineering blog describing the company's progress so far on diversity and inclusion. [18]

Chou has identified a number of possible reasons for the disparity in the representation of women in technology. 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. [5] She also thinks that networking opportunities and role models are more limited for women and minorities. [5] Chou has also stated that condescending attitudes toward women are pervasive in Silicon Valley. [19] According to one of her examples, a man she met at a conference tried to repeatedly correct her about a Quora feature that had been built while she worked at the company. [6] She has also commented that women who look very feminine are often ignored in technical settings. [7]

In late July 2015, Pinterest launched a project to hire more women and minorities and announced its commitment to publicly disclose its progress toward these goals and any obstacles encountered. Chou's role in highlighting the issue has been credited as a reason for the initiative. The initiative received praise from Jesse Jackson. [20] In August 2015, Chou participated in the Twitter hashtag campaign #ILookLikeAnEngineer, started by Isis Anchalee from OneLogin and intended to show that people (particularly women) of a wide range of appearances could be engineers. Chou's participation was noted in the New York Times . [21] May 2016 saw the launch of the diversity consulting group Project Include, founded by Chou, Erica Baker, Freada Kapor Klein, Ellen Pao and others. Its approach was quickly described as "taking a page out of open source software." [8]

Public appearances

In April 2018, Chou spoke at Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series. [22] In June 2018, she spoke at Vogue Australia's new conference Vogue Codes in Sydney. [23] Chou has also previously spoken at TechCrunch's Disrupt SF conference. [24]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Freada Kapor Klein</span> Venture capitalist, social policy researcher and philanthropist (born 1952)

Freada Kapor Klein is an American venture capitalist, social policy researcher and philanthropist. As a partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, she is known for efforts to diversify the technology workforce through activism and investments. Her 2007 book Giving Notice: Why the Best and the Brightest Leave the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay examines the reasons people have for leaving corporate America as well as the human and financial cost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Don Valentine</span> American venture capitalist (1932–2019)

Donald Thomas Valentine was an American venture capitalist who concentrated mainly on technology companies in the United States. As the founder of Sequoia Capital, he has been referred to as the "grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital". The Computer History Museum credited him as playing "a key role in the formation of a number of industries such as semiconductors, personal computers, personal computer software, digital entertainment and networking."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Cohler</span> American venture capitalist

Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charlie Cheever</span> American businessman

Charlie Cheever is the co-founder of Quora, an online knowledge market. Cheever also founded expo.dev, a web app that works both with iOS and Android by writing in Javascript. Additionally, he works at castle.xyz, developing the mobile application Castle - Make and Play which allows users to play and create interactive scenes, which can range from simple art and drawings to tiny homemade games and music.

THE YES is a retail app and platform that focuses on women's fashion and clothing. Its algorithms analyze user data in order to optimize product personalization. THE YES has headquarters in New York City and Silicon Valley, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pinterest</span> American social media platform

Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pinterest, Inc. was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Marita Cheng is the founder of Robogals. She was named the 2012 Young Australian of the Year. She is the founder and current CEO of Aubot, a start-up robotics company. She co-founded Aipoly, an app to assist blind people to recognise objects using their mobile phones. She was named as one of the World's Top 50 women in Technology by Forbes in 2018 and was recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. On 9 June 2019, Cheng was appointed a member of the Order of Australia for significant service to science and technology, particularly to robotics.

Amelia Cousins Greenhall is an American feminist tech blogger. She cofounded feminist tech blog and publication Model View Culture with Shanley Kane. Greenhall is co-founder and Executive Director of Double Union, a feminist women-only hackerspace in San Francisco, with Valerie Aurora, and is a Quantified Self enthusiast. Greenhall is the publisher and co-founder of Open Review Quarterly, a literary journal on modern culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aileen Lee</span> American investor

Aileen Lee is a U.S. venture capital angel investor and co-founder of Cowboy Ventures.

Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yury Melnichek</span>

Yury Melnichek is a tech-entrepreneur, venture investor and software engineer. He was born in Minsk (Belarus), lived in Switzerland for more than 16 years and now lives in Cyprus. He was the founder of the free cartographic service MapsWithMe, AIMATTER company and Vochi. In December 2021, together with Anna Melnichek, founded the investment company Melnichek Investments to invest in promising machine learning and biotech startups. Apart from investment activities, Yury provides consulting services in venture investment, mobile applications marketing, and also provides consultancy services for IT-companies and startups working with machine learning, computer vision and data science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isis Anchalee</span> Canadian full-stack engineer

Isis Anchalee is a Canadian full-stack engineer.

Kaya Thomas-Wilson is an American app developer. She is the creator of We Read Too, an iOS app that helps readers discover books for and by people of color. Thomas is a volunteer mentor with Black Girls Code and a Made with Code role model. She has received recognition for her work to improve diversity in the tech industry and was honored in 2015 by Michelle Obama at BET's Black Girls Rock! award show and was named one of Glamour's 2016 College Women of the Year.

Jyoti Bansal is an Indian-American technology entrepreneur. He founded his first company AppDynamics in April 2008, and went on to serve as CEO until 2015. AppDynamics was purchased by Cisco Systems for $3.7 billion, a day before AppDynamics was due for an initial public offering. He later went on to start two more technology companies – Harness.io and Traceable.ai, where he is CEO.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erica Baker</span> Engineer and engineering manager

Erica Joy Baker is an engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chief Technology Officer for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and known for her outspoken support of diversity and inclusion. She has worked at companies including GitHub, Google, Slack, Patreon, and Microsoft. She gained prominence in 2015 for starting an internal spreadsheet where Google employees reported their salary data to better understand pay disparities within the company. Kara Swisher of Recode called Baker the "woman to watch" in a profile in C Magazine.

Nicole Shariat Farb is an American entrepreneur and business executive. She is a co-founder and the chief executive officer of the video community Darby Smart. Prior to founding the company, Farb worked as a Head of Emerging Private Companies at Goldman Sachs. Farb has also appeared several times on Good Morning America as a DIY expert. She is also active in pursuing diversity and equality in the tech industry.

Li Fan is a computer scientist and the chief technology officer (CTO) at Circle. She has previously held positions at Lime, Pinterest, Google and Baidu. She is an expert in computer vision.

Niniane Wang is an American software engineer and technology executive. In her early career at Google, Wang co-created Google Desktop and created Google Lively. She was previously vice president of engineering of Niantic after her company Evertoon was acquired by Niantic in 2017.

References

  1. ↑ "Levo 100 Rising Stars". Levo. Retrieved 2016-07-30.
  2. ↑ Tafoya, Angela; Pang, Jeanine Celeste (2013-07-16). "SF's Rising Stars: 30 Under 30". Refinery29. Retrieved 2016-07-29.
  3. ↑ Lorenz, Taylor (2014-11-21). "Meet the female Pinterest engineer who forced tech companies to release their diversity numbers". Business Insider. Retrieved 2016-07-29.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Hempel, Jessi (April 21, 2015). "Quantifying Silicon Valley's Diversity Issue". Wired . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  5. 1 2 3 Larson, Selena (November 11, 2014). "Pinterest's Tracy Chou: How I Got My Start In Tech—Despite Myself. Now she's empowering others to do the same". ReadWriteWeb . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Levintova, Hannah. "Meet the Engineer Who Forced Silicon Valley's Gender Problem Into the Open. Tracy Chou is not, as one brogrammer put it, "too pretty to code."". Mother Jones . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  7. 1 2 3 4 Heller, Nathan (November 21, 2014). "How Pinterest Engineer Tracy Chou is Breaking the Silicon Ceiling". Vogue . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  8. 1 2 Isaac, Mike (2016-05-03). "Women in Tech Band Together to Track Diversity, After Hours". The New York Times. Retrieved 2016-07-29.
  9. ↑ "Social Media Platforms Failed to Tackle Abuse. So Tracy Chou Stepped In". Time. Retrieved 2022-09-19.
  10. ↑ "Tracy Chou — Software Engineer and Geek Girl". 100 Passionate People. 2010-05-31. Retrieved 2016-07-30.
  11. ↑ Cao, Sissi (March 8, 2018). "Lopsided Gender Ratios in Tech Are Giving Women 'Imposter Syndrome'". Observer. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  12. ↑ Burns, Matt (June 29, 2015). "Pinterest's Tracy Chou To Talk Diversity At Disrupt SF 2015". TechCrunch . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  13. ↑ Perez, Sarah (August 11, 2015). "Makerbase Is An IMDb Of Who Made Your Favorite Apps And Websites". TechCrunch . Retrieved August 11, 2015.
  14. ↑ Al-Heeti, Abrar (February 6, 2020). "Tracy Chou's app for blocking online harassment is in beta". CNET . Retrieved May 9, 2020.
  15. ↑ Perez, Sarah (2024-03-11). "After losing access to Twitter's API, Block Party pivots to privacy". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-05-08.
  16. ↑ Chou, Tracy (October 11, 2013). "Where are the numbers?" . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Techies Interview". 2016-01-31. Retrieved 2016-07-30.
  18. ↑ "Diversity and inclusion at Pinterest". Pinterest. July 24, 2014. Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  19. ↑ "What are some of the sexist and insulting statements women in technology/engineering hear from male colleagues?". Quora. Retrieved 2016-07-30.
  20. ↑ Guynn, Jessica (July 31, 2015). "Exclusive: Pinterest launches innovative diversity project". USA Today . Retrieved August 5, 2015.
  21. ↑ Varn, Kathryn (August 5, 2015). "Woman Behind #ILookLikeAnEngineer Says Campaign Against Gender Stereotypes Is 'Long Overdue'". New York Times . Retrieved August 11, 2015.
  22. ↑ "Tracy Chou: The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series". Stanford main University. April 25, 2018. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  23. ↑ "Meet the software engineer whose call for gender diversity in tech has created lasting change". Vogue. April 12, 2018. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  24. ↑ "Disrupt SF: Past Speakers & Judges". TechCrunch. Retrieved 24 October 2018.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.