James Barrese, Chief Technology Officer, PayPal
Technology has infiltrated our lives, 
PayPal’s employees are critical to keeping up with this dynamic tech environment. What started as a company of three back in 1998 has grown to more than 15,000 employees around the world, with different socioeconomic, cultural, gender, ethnic and educational backgrounds – and everybody makes important contributions.
And like many companies, our customers are incredibly diverse as well: they consist of consumers and merchants from 203 different markets in the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. This means there are specific needs they face in their day-to-day buying experiences that require products and services that address those requirements.
These two points interconnect, because to build solutions for diverse audiences requires diverse thinking. Unfortunately, the tech industry is not the most diverse – a fact not lost on our industry. A poignant new documentary, CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York last week, explores the realities of diversity in tech and shines a light on the gap that exists for women and minorities in the industry. According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, by 2018 there will be 1.4 million open technology jobs in the U.S. and just 61 percent of those openings will be filled, based on the current rate of students graduating with computer science degrees. And of those, only 29 percent of applicants will be women.
Unfortunately, these numbers are real, disheartening and unacceptable. A growing body of research backs the importance of diversity in the workplace. A recent McKinsey study reports that gender-diverse companies are 15 percent more likely to outperform their peers, and the same goes for ethnically-diverse companies, at 35 percent.
That’s why at PayPal, we’ve put diversity at the forefront. This is particularly important to me, because throughout my career I’ve worked alongside some remarkably talented women who have brought next-generation technologies to market. Their passion, energy and skillsets have been a driving force in the industry, and they’re completely reimagining and redefining how we innovate every day.
For five years now, the Women’s Initiative Network (WIN) at eBay Inc. has helped affect positive change in our organization. Thanks to WIN, we’ve more than doubled the number of women in leadership since 2010. And now, nearly half of our workforce – 42 percent – is female. In my organization at PayPal, we seek out opportunities for women, championing their growth and accomplishments through trainings and mentoring, and by encouraging them to attend external events or hosting our own. We have WIN-related goals to improve our talent pipeline, and we cascade these throughout the organization.
We’ve also committed to building partnerships that help us make the industry more diverse. For example, we’re work with the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University to drive corporate research aimed at improving the evaluation and promotion process for women in tech. And we recently sponsored the first-ever youth and diversity focused hackathon at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, which paired high school and college-aged youth with professional mentors to collaborate and build a web or mobile-based app hacking the Education, Health or Justice sectors.
While I am so proud of our efforts to date, these examples just skim the surface of the work to be done. In order for us to provide our customers with the best possible services, we’ll need to attract and retain people who help push our organization further by bringing diverse thinking to solving real-world challenges for our customers.
There’s no doubt that we are still in the early days of making progress, both as a company and as an industry, but I am committed to seeing the diversity challenge through so that we have meaningful, lasting impacts.