Friday, May 6, 2016

Women are Standing up for Themselves when it comes to Equality in Companies

In the Bay Area's very own Silicon Valley, women and people of color are having a harder time getting onto firms and panels. Three women joined together to create a database called Project Include in attempt to change companies.

Project Include is meant to address pay gaps in companies, hoping to change this discrimination against minorities. 

The founders are Ellen Pao, Erica Baker, and Laura Gomez. They realized that women like themselves get paid significantly less than their counterparts. 

Companies try to dismiss their ignorance for discrimination by coming up with excuses. "The standard mantra for every company on diversity statistics is, 'We're not doing well, but we're working on it,'" says Pao. 

Pao has experience working with discriminatory firms, such as her former law firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. She sued them with accusations of gender inequity, but she lost.

Project Include has one of the more visible pushes in Silicon Valley because other companies struggle with criticism and the makeup of their workforces. Luckily for this group, their makeup is mostly female, which stands out in the the crowd. 

Once the group reaches their peak of popularity, they will begin to reveal social bias in workforces. they believe that it is important that this prejudice subsides in the future. 

Large companies have paid attention to Project Include's main goal, and have admitted to their lack of diverse groups and employees. Some have tried to change that, like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google. 

Michael Moritz, a partner in the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, confessed to having absolutely no female members, and he intends on fixing this issue by hiring women. He also said that the firm was blind to gender and race. 

This organization has excellent ideas about diversity, and they will hopefully succeed in changing the way that minorities are perceived in the workforce.

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