Building a More Diverse Workforce Through Software

A Q&A with Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming. Tech companies have a diversity problem, especially when it comes to hiring software engineers.

Software may be eating the world, but for the most part that software is created by white males, despite the fact that there are many qualified engineers in the marketplace who are neither.

A series of self-reinforcing cycles reinforces the status quo. Companies tend to hire alumnae from certain universities and workers from particular companies; they also rely heavily on referrals from existing employees. The result is a workforce with a lot of faces that look similar.

It’s the kind of problem you might expect could be solved by, well, software. Human biases in hiring, innocent and otherwise, can be corrected by an approach that ranks candidates based on the quality of their body of publicly visible work -- or so the thinking goes. That’s what Gild does. It’s one of a few up-and-coming companies that has sought to give its customers -- some 300 companies at last count -- a leg up in finding qualified software developers.

Gild CEO Sheeroy Desai and chief scientist Vivienne Ming talked about how the company is starting to help its customers grapple with the difficulties of building a more diverse work force.