Pinterest has a secret weapon. Her name is Tracy Chou.
Thanks to this 27-year-old, the social scrapbooking site has lifted the number of female software developers it employs by 5 per cent in one year. It's not a huge increase but she had no particular target, quota or even affirmative action in sight.
And now other technology companies are taking notice.
"We're very much against having quotas or trying to set ratios around hiring targets," Chou told Fairfax Media while in Melbourne for the Above All Human conference this week.
"Being a female engineer in an environment that's primarily male dominated can be a little bit lonely at times.
"In the past, I felt very personally frustrated and dejected. I wasn't really sure why I wanted to be in the industry, even though I loved the work."
Chou says affirmative action is an invitation for employers to "lower the bar" for women, and would only compound the problem of negative stereotyping of female coders.
Instead, Pinterest – where Chou has been a lead engineer for three years, after a stint at Q&A site Quora – is targeting strong female coding graduates by visiting universities and encouraging women to apply for jobs and internships.
To address the retention issues that disproportionately affect female hires, the company is also promoting a policy of equal opportunity for advancement. This is supported internally by initiatives such as training for managers about unconscious bias in the promotion process.
This year, Pinterest's summer intern program was 29 per cent women. Three of those were hired full-time as engineers.
Yet it was Chou who pushed Pinterest's management to publicly disclose, for the first time, the number of female software engineers it employed. In October last year, the answer was 12 per cent.
And it was Chou who encouraged more Silicon Valley companies to do the same, with the aim of better quantifying the gender gap in her profession.
Nearly 200 technology companies have since contributed to her ongoing data collection project. Among them, the average of female engineers on the books is 15 per cent.
A Code.org analysis of United States Department of Labour statistics predicts there will be 1 million more coding jobs than graduates by 2020 in the US.
It's pretty clear the sector needs the women.
Chou's efforts have helped push Pinterest above the female coder average to 17 per cent.
But she admits there's a long way to go, and is well aware of the pressures.
Female coders are expected to "uphold the reputation of an entire minority class", she says, are frequently stereotyped, and often feel isolated.
These feelings begin early, when aspiring female coders realise they are an anomaly in computer science classes.
There are far less subtle factors, too, such as the recent "GamerGate" controversy when threats of rape and murder were directed at women gamers online. It's enough to make every parent tell their girls to run a mile from the tech industry.
Dr Marian Baird, who heads the University of Sydney's Women and Work Research Group, commends Chou for attempting to quantify the issue, but says having targets is helpful in pushing back against the pressures.
"There's quite a body of literature that talks about the need for a critical mass of women in order to change the culture of a place so they will stay, and unless they have targets, it's very easy for the issue to drop off the agenda," she says.
That magic number, Dr Baird says, is 30 per cent.
Thirty-one of the companies that participated in Chou's project – or just 16 per cent – have achieved this "critical mass" of 30 per cent female engineers. However, each of these has a relatively small engineering team, generally fewer than 10 developers. .
However, 30 companies on the list employ no female developers.
Among the 20 largest developer teams on the list – those with 65 or more engineers, including Pinterest, Mozilla, Dropbox, Yelp, Etsy, Foursquare, Wikimedia and Airbnb – all fall short of the 30 per cent target.
ThoughtWorks, with the largest developer team at 1425, is tipping 23 per cent women; while GitHub, ironically, where Chou is hosting the project, has just 6.25 per cent in its 160-strong engineering team.
Other tech giants are conspicuously absent from the data. Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter, have, instead, published overall diversity figures, which show their female workforce at about 30 per cent across the board.
But these do not reflect the percentages of women in high-paying computer engineering jobs, as they include all departments.
Twitter, Apple, Amazon and other household tech names came under fresh fire this week for refusing to disclose detailed diversity statistics to the US Department of Labour.
With mammoth employers like these reluctant to even face the size of the problem, Chou sees there's much to be done.
But she believes the most powerful thing she can do is to stay put.
"I still really enjoy being a software engineer," she says.
"I don't just want to be talking about the gender gap. It is more impactful for me to be an advocate for gender diversity while still working."
