Role Models: Edward Kim, Gusto’s Cofounder and CTO
by Miki Saxon
After reading about Gusto’s approach to diversity, I posed this question to a male founder I know and a friend of his, also a founder.
As a founder, what would you do if a top performer asked for a one-on-one meeting because she was uncomfortable and being treated poorly as the one woman on a team of 18 men.
The responses weren’t surprising; one was disappointing and the other disgusting.
One said he would do what he could, but also tell her that she’d be better off if she toughened up.
I don’t know the second guy very well, but it turned out that he is much more a bro. He said he’d tell her to stop whining and “grow a pair” and if it still bothered her maybe software engineering wasn’t where she belonged.
Compare them to Gusto cofounder and CTO Edward Kim’s, response.
Kim, Lee says, was extraordinarily receptive. In fact, he made it a personal project to study the gender breakdown on the engineering teams at other tech firms. The numbers he found were dismal.
Only 12% of the engineering staffers at 84 tech firms were female… He also read a 2015 McKinsey study showing that companies with diverse workforces outperform financially. “The fact that no one else in tech was able to really crack the gender diversity nut and solve it represented an opportunity for us,” Kim says. “If we want to reimagine what HR is like for the very diverse workforces of our small-business customers, we ourselves have to build a diverse workforce.”
Boston Consulting published findings similar to McKensey’s in January. (Well worth reading.)
Kim’s and Gusto’s efforts have paid off handsomely.
- Gusto’s women-only recruiting effort lasted six months. It stopped, Kim says, because “we exceeded our goals.”
- Though hiring women engineers took more time, Kim says, Gusto never dropped its standards. “It bothers me when people say that prioritizing diversity lowers the bar in terms of the caliber of talent you’re able to hire,” he says. “That is simply not true.” Nor, he says, was there any pushback from inside Gusto.
- Gusto also addressed its compensation policy. Since 2016 its salaries have been audited by Mercer, a human resources consulting firm, which has found no gender pay disparity. Benefits include 16 weeks of paid leave for a primary parent, plus an additional $100 a week for groceries and food deliveries, $100 a month for six months of housecleaning and up to $500 for a baby-sleep coach.
- Now that 17 of Gusto’s 70 engineers are female, it’s getting a little easier, says Gusto’s HR head, Maryanne Brown Caughey. “It’s kind of a domino effect,” she says. “Women know they’re joining a welcoming community.”
While Kim is pleased with the results, he isn’t resting on his laurels.
While Gusto has made progress, its engineering team has no Latinos and no African-Americans. Kim says Gusto has two hiring goals in 2018: senior women and racial diversity in engineering. “The way we make progress is by focusing on one problem,” Kim says, “and then we move on to the next.”
Role model, indeed; techdom needs a lot more founders like Kim.
Image credit: Gusto
