[adinathoughts]

Hi there, I worked on Dear Tech People.

The goal of Dear Tech People is to provide a degree of transparency into diversity data--a topic that frankly a lot of companies feel is taboo and too hard to talk about. Outside the very few companies that have released diversity reports, most companies have poor, incomplete, or no diversity data available internally, and diversity advocates we spoke with found it difficult to make an internal case for inclusion initiatives without data to back up efforts.

Dear Tech People is by no means perfect, but what we've found is that some amount of data, even imperfect data, can give people an idea of where they are and what their goals are. Even some amount of data helps kick off a discussion of leadership or helps people make a case for an internship program that works with HBCUs. Furthermore, the long term vision is to raise the standard of self-reporting, and get companies to fill in incomplete data with complete data that they gather via their own diversity reports. If a company (or even an employee at a company) doesn't think the data looks right, we want to work with them to figure out how to survey their company and get their self-reported data up to standard.

But for now, we work with what we have, and that is public profiles on the internet. You can read more about how we put the methodology together here: http://www.deartechpeople.com/methodology