Tracy Chou, The Game Changer
For this week’s Women in Tech Wednesday, we have the influential Tracy Chou who isn’t afraid to voice her opinions and demand change in the workplace. Tracy is an advocate for gender and racial equality specifically in the tech world.
At just 26, Chou is a lead software engineer at Pinterest and also travels around the world to conferences aimed at encouraging women to join the STEM field. Tracy attended Stanford University for both her bachelors and master’s degrees. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s in Computer Science. From a young age, Chou has been surrounded by code. Both of her parents have PhDs in Computer Science and after both internships at Facebook and Google, she decided to pursue her masters in Computer Science. Tracy loves to code and wants to see more women in her field. Before she landed the job at Pinterest, she was working for Quora where she was also coding. When she arrived at Pinterest, back when it was just a startup she noticed that there were not a lot of women in the office.
In 2013, Tracy published a blog post asking companies to be transparent about their workers’ demographics which went viral. Companies began sending in their numbers and they all had one thing in common, a lack in diversity and gender. Soon after gathering all the data, Chou has been advocating and attending conferences to encourage women to join the STEM Field. She also uses her social media presence as a platform to voice the diversity issues the tech world is facing.
Tracy is truly an inspirational woman in technology. We can’t wait to see how she changes the tech world and hope to see her become a CEO of a company one day.
If you want to know more about Tracy, you can find her twitter here and here blog here. Enjoy and always challenge the status quo!