Tracy Chou (Project Include) - Debugging the Brogrammer Culture

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Business, Life Lessons, Creativity, Startups, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Education, Stanford University, Leadership, Challenges, Journey, Culture, Etl, Innovation, Founders, Stanford, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 740 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2018

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As tech companies come under fire for mishandling our data, with one blog post, a young software engineer forced these firms to share some of the most damning information they keep: the demographics of their workforce. Tracy Chou turned concepts familiar to her profession — like open sourcing, metrics reporting and benchmarking — to push for more diversity and inclusion throughout her industry. She discusses how the uphill battle continues through Project Include and why, in this case, a top-down approach from tech leaders is needed now.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Who you are defines how you build.
0:05.0	This is the Entrepreneural Thought Leaders series.
0:09.0	Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.
0:13.0	On today's episode we have Tracy Chow, who is an early engineer at both Pinterest and Quora,
0:20.0	and is now a founding member of Project Include and the arena.
0:24.9	Tracy is most well known for her work pushing for diversity in the tech industry.
0:29.4	She was named to Forbes Tech 30 under 30.
0:32.8	Tracy is a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University,
0:36.2	where she was a term and a Mayfield fellow. Here's Tracy. Let's start with a little bit about me and how I
0:44.2	ended up here. I grew up in the Bay Area. Both my parents were software engineers. Ph.D.
0:50.4	is a computer science. It seemed very obvious that I was going to walk down this path in tech.
0:56.0	I came to Stanford not exactly knowing what I wanted to do,
1:00.0	but thinking maybe computer science or something in this domain.
1:05.0	She surprisingly was not that straightforward for me.
1:09.0	When I took my first couple of courses in computer
1:11.6	science I was intimidated and decided to not major in CS and it was um she was so I ended up doing
1:23.2	electrical engineering because I felt like it's still technical but at least no one has been
1:27.4	programming EE circuits since they were eight the way I felt like it's still technical, but at least no one has been programming EE circuits since they were eight, the way it felt like many of my classmates
1:32.4	and computer science had been. So I switched over into electrical engineering, decided I didn't
1:37.5	like that at all. And so I was trying to figure out my way out of EE and only ended up majoring
1:43.5	in computer science because one of my friends had essentially
1:46.6	dared me to do it. I knew I was going to do a co-term, like a great deal to get a master's degree
	...

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