Aerica Shimizu Banks and Ifeoma Ozoma on Racial Bias in Pinterest (2020)

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Gender and Racial Discrimination in the Workplace

Based on a survey by Time’s Up Foundation in 2020, the salary difference is one of the most persistent—yet observable, and thus solvable—indicators of systemic sexism and racism in the USA. On average, women in the United States are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to men, Black women receive just 62 cents on the dollar.

More than half of the Black women surveyed faced gender or racial inequality or other similar barriers to higher wages. About half of Black women do not have enough money right now to provide for their basic needs, such as food and shelter. [1]

African Americans are woefully underrepresented in corporate America, where the Fortune 500 has just four Black CEOs, and senior executive teams are mostly made up exclusively of white males. And the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened inequality in the corporate world, unduly claiming the lives and livelihoods of African Americans. [2]

Company Profile

Pinterest (2020).png

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to make it easy to store and discover content (specifically 'ideas') on the internet using photos and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos in the form of pinboards. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp and had more than 400 million active monthly users as of August 2020.

Racial Bias in Pinterest

In June 2020, there were viral tweets from two ex-employees of Pinterest, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks. Those two women work in the same division in Pinterest, and they decided to come forward through posting those tweets to let people know about their own experience of receiving intense discrimination and terrifying retaliation.

Aerica Shimizu Banks and Ifeoma Ozoma

All started in May 2019, when a former colleague of Banks, Ifeoma Ozoma, informed her about a job at Pinterest. The role would be to lead the federal policy team of the company from its new office in Washington DC. Banks has been reluctant to leave her previously happy career with Google and its lucrative stock-based compensation. However, she saw that Pinterest, as a much smaller but still fast-growing tech company, was pretty intriguing seeing from the potential for upward mobility.

"I was promised that there was no timeline for promotion," Banks said of the Pinterest recruiting process. "As long as you're killing it, you will get promoted."

Both Banks and Ozoma told Business Insider that their experience with the social network's public policy team was derailed by what they thought was retaliatory behaviour, a doxxing incident that provoked rape and death threats against Ozoma, and interaction between Banks and the private investigator of the company that seemed like an interrogation. They also say that they have not been given salaries and seniority ranks that their work duties warranted. [3]

Banks said she was uncomfortable at a team dinner with the manager, Charlie Hale, on a Japanese ramen restaurant shortly after she was onboarded to Pinterest. Banks said he made comments about a Jewish colleague being "Seinfeld-esque". Hale, according to Banks, pointed out a poster stating that Ramen had been invented in China and asked whether she thought that Japanese people should be offended, an apparent reference to her Afro-Japanese heritage. "I'm thinking, the only person that said something offensive is you," Banks says.

She reported the evening to HR, which investigated the incident but evidently did not find that Hale had behaved improperly. Given her inadequately educated manager, Banks had hoped that she could rise through the ranks easily by hard work.

She soon realized that wasn't the case either. She thought like she was regularly undertaking jobs above her pay scale, and in December, as budgets were determined for the new year, Banks asked her boss for advice on promotion. It took him weeks to react, but when he did, he discussed the need for a number of years of tenure to get a bigger pay. That criterion had never been conveyed to Banks before, which was in contrast to the "just kill it" advice that Pinterest had obtained from the recruiters.

"I believe I was told I pretty much didn't qualify," Banks said.

Response from Pinterest

Two days after two black ex-Pinterest public policy officials alleged in viral Twitter posts that they were underpaid, received derogatory remarks from their boss and were subject to reprisals, Pinterest chief executive Ben Silbermann attempted to dissuade angry workers. The image of Pinterest as a kinder, gentler social media juggernaut grew out of the site’s predominantly female user base and soft-spoken CEO — a reputation held aloft in recent years by the company’s commitments to racial and gender diversity. But after Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, two of the three people on Pinterest's policy team resigned together at the end of May and soon made their statements public, Pinterest's reputation has been more difficult to preserve.

Silbermann sent an effusive letter to his employees, praising them not to confront these problems.

"What I've noticed over the last few weeks is that pieces of our society have been broken. Truly, I didn't realize how much work we had to do. It's not an excuse, it's a flaw in leadership, and I'm so sorry to let you down," he said. "It's been heartbreaking to hear the stories of Black employees who feel like they don't belong to Pinterest. Owing to the lack of representation in executive management and the board of directors. Since they are reluctant to discuss issues with their supervisors or with HR. Since they don't believe they have the same opportunity to develop their careers." [4]

Reference

  1. TIME’S UP Foundation. GENDER AND RACIAL INEQUITY DURING CRISIS: Black Women the Pay Gap. 2020. timesupfoundation.org. Retrieved Feb 1, 2021.
  2. Guynn, Jessica. George Floyd protests lead to reckoning as Black employees speak out on racism and discrimination in the workplace. Jun 17, 2020. usatoday.com. Retrieved Feb 1, 2021.
  3. Bort, Julie and Rogers, Taylor Nicole. The two Black employees who took on Pinterest explain why they quit, their fight for pay, the death threats, the private investigator: 'It was a torturous experience’. Jun 24, 2020. businessinsider.com. Retrieved Feb 1, 2021.
  4. Tiku, Nitasha. Black women say Pinterest created a den of discrimination — despite its image as the nicest company in tech. Jul 5, 2020. washingtonpost.com. Retrieved Feb 1, 2021.