The Download: open vs closed AI, and Google’s uneasy demo
The big story
Why it’s so hard to make tech more diverse
Tracy Chou has a long history of working to expose Silicon Valley’s diversity issues. As an engineer at Pinterest, she published a widely circulated blog post calling for tech companies to share data on how many women worked on their engineering team, and collected their responses in a public database that revealed how homogeneous many technical teams at top companies still were.
About a year later, she started a company called Block Party that targets online harassment by giving Twitter users more control over which tweets appear in their feed and mentions.
Here, we check in with Chou, who is based in San Francisco, to learn more about what it takes to make change in the tech sector, and what entrepreneurs like her are up against. Read the full story.
—Wudan Yan