Page 50 - Forbes - USA (February 2018)

Entrepreneurs DIVERSITY

Julia Lee told Edward Kim she was uncomfortable
being the only female engineer at Gusto.
woman. Before she got to Gusto, she told
Kim, “people often assumed I didn’t know
the answer to a problem because I was a fe-
male engineer.” Even at Gusto, she was re-
luctant to share her feelings of self-doubt.
Kim, Lee says, was extraordinarily recep-
tive. In fact, he made it a personal project to
study the gender breakdown on the engi-
neering teams at other tech firms. The num-
bers he found were dismal.
Only 12% of the engineering staffers
at 84 tech firms were female, according
to statistics gathered in a public Google
Doc posted in 2013 by Tracy Chou, then
an engineer at Pinterest. Kim read a U.S.
census report on racial and gender dis-
parity in STEM employment and was
troubled by a National Public Radio re-
port that showed an increase in women
graduating with computer science de-
grees through the early 1980s and then a
steep decline from 1984 on. He also read
a 2015 McKinsey study showing that
companies with diverse workforces out-
perform financially. “The fact that no
one else in tech was able to really crack
the gender diversity nut and solve it rep-
resented an opportunity for us,” Kim
says. “If we want to reimagine what HR
is like for the very diverse workforces of
our small-business customers, we our-
selves have to build a diverse workforce.”
After a series of meetings with Kim and Lee,
Cracking the Code Gusto’s human resources team launched a plan
to attract women engineers. Initial steps includ-
ed writing job descriptions that avoided mascu-
Challenged by a female employee, Gusto, an line phrases like “Ninja rock star coder.” Gusto’s
HR-software unicorn in San Francisco, figures out most important step: For a six-month period start-
how to hire women engineers. ing in September 2015, the company devoted 100%
of its engineering recruitment efforts to women.
BY SUSAN ADAMS
While it solicited only women, it considered male
applicants who approached the firm and treat-
ne spring day in 2015, Julia Lee, a top ed all candidates equally, which kept Gusto from
performer on the engineering team at running afoul of antidiscrimination laws, accord-
the payroll-software startup Gusto, asked ing to Gusto lawyer Liza Kostinskaya. The pitch to
OEdward Kim, the company’s cofounder women included emails signed by Lee inviting fe-
and chief technology officer, for a one-on-one meet- male candidates to have an initial talk with her and
ing. Sitting together on a gray couch in the middle of was backed by $60,000 the company spent to be a
their open-plan office in San Francisco’s SoMa neigh- sponsor for two years at the biggest annual wom-
borhood, Lee, a Stanford grad who had interned at en’s tech conclave, the Grace Hopper conference. TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD FOR FORBES
Google and Palantir, told Kim that she loved her work Kim also published a blog post that made Gus-
but was struggling with one issue. Of the 18 people on to’s diversity numbers public and broadcast its
Gusto’s engineering team, Lee, then 26, was the only goal of hiring more women engineers. “We be-

48 | FORBES FEBRUARY 28, 2018