Tracy Chou (born 1987) is a software engineer and advocate for
diversity
Diversity, diversify, or diverse may refer to:
Business
*Diversity (business), the inclusion of people of different identities (ethnicity, gender, age) in the workforce
*Diversity marketing, marketing communication targeting diverse customers
* ...
in technology related fields. She previously worked at
Pinterest
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...
and
Quora
Quora () is a social question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that ...
with internship experience at
Rocket Fuel
Rocket propellant is the reaction mass of a rocket. This reaction mass is ejected at the highest achievable velocity from a rocket engine to produce thrust. The energy required can either come from the propellants themselves, as with a chemical ...
,
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
, and
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
.
She is best known for raising the profile of the issue of the low representation of women in
technology companies
A technology company (or tech company) is an electronics-based technological company, including, for example, business relating to digital electronics, software, and internet-related services, such as e-commerce services.
Details
According to '' ...
, and pressuring companies to reveal more statistics about the composition of their workforce.
In 2016, she co-founded the advocacy group Project Include with seven other women from the industry.
In 2022, she was named one of Time's 12 Women of the Year.
Early life
Chou is a daughter of computer scientists based in
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...
who immigrated from
Taiwan
Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...
.
[ She attended St. Francis High School in Mountain View.
]
Education
Chou studied computer science at Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
with a specialization in machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.
Machine ...
and artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
.[ During that time, she interned at ]Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
, Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
, and Rocket Fuel
Rocket propellant is the reaction mass of a rocket. This reaction mass is ejected at the highest achievable velocity from a rocket engine to produce thrust. The energy required can either come from the propellants themselves, as with a chemical ...
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.[
]
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
Quora () is a social question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can collaborate by editing questions and commenting on answers that ...
, 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
Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...
, becoming one of the first 15 employees at the then-fledgling pinboard company.[
In February 2015, Chou signed on as a consultant for the ]United States Digital Service
The United States Digital Service is a technology unit housed within the Executive Office of the President of the United States. It provides consultation services to federal agencies on information technology. It seeks to improve and simplify dig ...
, a consortium of technology practitioners trying to make government in the United States more efficient. In August 2015, ''TechCrunch
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
In 2010, AOL acquired the company for approximately ...
'' reported that Chou was a featured maker at Makerbase, a service that "make it easier for anyone to discover who built some of the most popular websites and apps people use every day."
As of December 2018, Chou is the CEO and founder of Block Party
A block party or street party is a party in which many members of a single community congregate, either to observe an event of some importance or simply for mutual solidarity and enjoyment. The name comes from the form of the party, which ofte ...
, "a consumer app that tackles online harassment and puts you back in control."
Activism
In October 2013, Chou attended the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) is a series of conferences designed to bring the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. It is the world's largest gathering of women in computing. The celebra ...
, 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.[ To facilitate sharing of the responses she received, Chou set up a repository on code-sharing site ]GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
which allows anyone to submit a pull request
In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centra ...
. Within a week, the repository had statistics on over 50 firms, and by January 2016, it had statistics on 250 firms.[ Chou's focus on the issue is also credited with pressuring larger companies such as ]Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
, Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
, and Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
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 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.][ She also thinks that networking opportunities and role models are more limited for women and minorities.][ Chou has also stated that condescending attitudes toward women are pervasive in Silicon Valley. 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.][ She has also commented that women who look very feminine are often ignored in technical settings.][
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
Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; born October 8, 1941) is an American political activist, Baptist minister, and politician. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow U.S. senator ...
. In August 2015, Chou participated in the Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
hashtag campaign #ILookLikeAnEngineer, started by Isis Anchalee
Isis Anchalee is a Canadian full-stack engineer.
Biography
Anchalee was born in 1993, and began teaching herself how to code in 2013. She was employed by OneLogin, Uber, and later Hustle, where she worked as a software engineer on its product ...
from OneLogin
OneLogin, Inc. is a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) provider that develops a unified access management (UAM) platform to enterprise-level businesses and organizations. It was founded in 2009 by brothers Thomas Pedersen and Chris ...
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
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
''. May 2016 saw the launch of the diversity consulting group ''Project Include'', founded by Chou, Erica Baker, Freada Kapor Klein
Freada Kapor Klein (born August 26, 1952) 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 technolog ...
, Ellen Pao
Ellen Kangourou Pao (born 1970) is an American investor and former CEO of social media company Reddit.
Pao first became known in 2012 for filing a failed gender discrimination suit against her employer, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, a ...
and others. Its approach was quickly described as "taking a page out of open source software
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
."
Public appearances
In April 2018, Chou spoke at Stanford University's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series. In June 2018, she spoke at Vogue Australia's new conference Vogue Codes in Sydney. Chou has also previously spoken at TechCrunch's Disrupt SF conference.
References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Chou, Tracy
American software engineers
Living people
American people of Taiwanese descent
Stanford University alumni
American feminists
American women engineers
Google employees
Lesbian feminists
Radical feminists
Facebook employees
1987 births
American computer programmers
21st-century American women