Can An App Fix Silicon Valley’s Workforce Diversity Problem?

When Eileen Carey decamped to Silicon Valley from New York three years ago to take a stab at building her own tech company, one thing immediately stood out as she traversed the region's cafes and conferences: Men were everywhere. And it was kinda weird.

"I've gone to coffee shops here where I am the only woman out of 25 people in the coffee shop," Carey recently told Motherboard. "It's just so in your face."

That Silicon Valley isn't exactly a bastion of diversity goes without saying, with the region's biggest tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter, regularly publishing reports showing a stunning lack of diversity in their ranks, particularly in positions of leadership. But rather than sit on the sidelines and watch these companies dawdle, Carey, 30, did what any self-respecting Silicon Valley entrepreneur would do when confronted with a problem of such magnitude. She built an app.

"We realized that there were no tools to find mentors," said Carey, describing early deliberations with her co-founder and CTO Lauren Mosenthal, "and that could be a huge opportunity with Glassbreakers if we could mobilize how women professionally network."

Glassbreakers, as Carey and Mosenthal explained to Motherboard over a series of recent interviews, is a software-as-a-service tool that algorithmically connects women and employees of diverse backgrounds. (Since it's a SaaS tool, it runs equally well on desktop and mobile platforms.) The idea, the co-founders said, is to make it easy for, say, new mothers to seek work-life balance advice from other women in a given company who've already had children, or, in an example I came up with, for Latino employees to discuss—heaven help us—what a Trump administration may mean for them and their families.

Creating these kinds of internal support groups, Glassbreakers' research suggests, makes the workplace a more comfortable environment for people who didn't hit the jackpot by being born white and male. It can help ensure that talented women and people of color don't exit stage left because of a toxic company culture that doesn't understand their needs or concerns. "People who are really active and participate in employee resource groups tend to get promoted more often than people who aren't in them," said Mosenthal.

"Any homogenous group is going to fall apart," said Carey. "And so, right now we're at this kinda of crisis point in tech where everybody is saying there's a problem. There are some people who just don't get it, but those are the people who are going to fail."

And if fostering a healthy environment for all employees isn't a concern for the large companies that Glassbreakers targets—the enterprise version of its software is marketed at companies with more than 1,000 employees—then improving their bottom line almost certainly is. (Carey was reluctant to go into specific details, but she noted that Glassbreakers is in use at companies that range in size from 10,000 employees to upwards of 100,000 employees, and that her company is on track to be profitable by the end of 2016.)

A 2014 study, produced by researchers at MIT, noted that diverse workplaces are more productive than non-diverse workplaces. And a March report from research firm McKinsey noted that Silicon Valley alone could add $25 billion to its GDP by 2025 if it achieved gender parity in the workforce.

"The heart of the problem, said Carey, "and the reason why gender inclusion is so important to business, is that it makes for better business decisions," After all, no less an executive than Tim Cook, Apple's CEO, famously declared that "diversity is the future of our company."

That Carey would leave her previous communications career in New York, where she worked for some of the biggest banks around to found a startup focused on improving equality in the workforce may not be altogether surprising when you consider her family history. Both of her grandmothers owned their own businesses, her mother worked on Wall Street, and her aunt once helped lead the New York Radical Feminists.

"Making a change for women in the workforce was always what I felt my life mission was," said Carey, "but it was when I got to Silicon Valley that I realized we didn't have to accept the world the way it was. We could change it."