Erica Baker

Erica Baker
A picture of Erica Baker.
Baker and Internetdagama 2016.
Born 1980 (age 37–38)
Germany[1]
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Alaska
Occupation Software engineer

Erica Baker (born 1980)[2] is an engineer and engineering manager in the San Francisco Bay Area, known for her outspoken support of diversity and inclusion. She has worked at companies including Google, Slack, and Patreon.[3][4][5][6] She gained prominence in 2015 for starting an internal spreadsheet where Google employees reported their salary data, to better understand pay disparities within the company.[7][8][9] Kara Swisher of Re/Code called Baker the "woman to watch" in a profile in C Magazine.[10]

Career

Google

Baker worked at Google from 2006 to May 2015, in various roles, ending with the role of Site Reliability Engineer (SRE).[11] In July 2015, after leaving Google for Slack, Baker revealed in a series of tweets that she had started an internal spreadsheet at Google for employees to disclose their salary information.[9] Based on the spreadsheet, a number of her colleagues were able to negotiate pay raises. Baker reported that a number of her colleagues sent her peer bonuses for starting the spreadsheet, but her peer bonuses were denied by management.[8][12][13] The spreadsheet sparked discussion on Google's pay disparities, non-transparency in pay determination, and potential gender and ethnicity differentials in pay. The spreadsheet would continue to be updated until 2017, when updated data from the spreadsheet was reported on in the New York Times.[14][7]

Slack

From May 2015 to July 2017, Baker worked as a build and release engineer at Slack.[11][15][5]

Kickstarter and Patreon

In June 2017, TechCrunch, and USA Today reported that Baker was leaving Slack to join Kickstarter as director of engineering, reporting to Lara Hogan, the newly appointed VP of Engineering, and working in Brooklyn.[3][4] Although her role did not officially involve diversity and inclusion, Baker said that fostering diversity and inclusion would be part of her job.[3] However, she ultimately stayed in the San Francisco Bay Area and became Senior Engineering Manager at Patreon.[6]

Work on diversity and inclusion

After creating the spreadsheet on Google's salary data and then leaving Google, Baker has been an advocate for diversity and inclusion on her blog and in other public fora. She was behind #RealDiversityNumbers, a Twitter movement to acquire numbers for various companies around retention and number of lawsuits settled out of court. Baker was critical of Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's remarks that suggested that inclusion efforts for ethnic and racial minorities were taking a backseat so that the company could focus on gender issues.[5] She also denounced a video series by Elissa Shevinsky, the author of Lean Out, stating that it only addressed the diversity problem superficially. Meredith L. Patterson took issue with Baker's comment and accused her of having a conflict of interest.[16] Baker, along with Tracy Chou, Freada Kapor Klein and Ellen Pao, was one of the founding members of Project Include, a startup launched in 2016 to provide diversity and inclusion strategies to client companies.[17] Erica also has a strong interest in genealogy.[18]

References

  1. ↑ "Erica Baker". Techies Project. 2016-02-02. Retrieved 2018-04-04.
  2. ↑ Erica Baker - Keynote - IND16, Internetstiftelsen i Sverige (Internet Foundation in Sweden), 2016-11-22.
  3. 1 2 3 Megan Rose Dickey (June 8, 2017). "Kickstarter hires Slack's Erica Baker as director of engineering". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  4. 1 2 Guynn, Jessica (June 8, 2017). "Erica Baker leaves Slack for Kickstarter". USA Today.
  5. 1 2 3 Megan Rose Dickey. "Slack Engineer Erica Baker: Diversity Efforts Need To Extend Beyond Gender". TechCrunch.
  6. 1 2 "#WCW: Recovering From Emotional Challenges, Doing Aerial Acrobatics, And Loving Donuts". techsesh. October 18, 2017. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  7. 1 2 Buxton, Madeline (September 9, 2017). "A Google Employee Spreadsheet Shows Pay Disparities Between Men & Women". Refinery29. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  8. 1 2 Weinberger, Matt. "Engineer says Google managers denied her bonuses when she tried to expose salary inequality". Business Insider.
  9. 1 2 Campos, Danilo. "@EricaJoy's salary transparency experiment at Google". Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  10. ↑ "Kara Swisher". C Magazine. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  11. 1 2 "Erica Baker". Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  12. ↑ Wakabayashi, Daisuke (August 11, 2017). "A Crisis Forces Google to Uphold Its Values While Fostering Debate". New York Times. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  13. ↑ Zakrzewski, Cat (July 21, 2015). "Ex-Google Employee Exposes Unequal Pay With Spreadsheet". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  14. ↑ Wakabayashi, Daisuke (September 8, 2017). "At Google, Employee-Led Effort Finds Men Are Paid More Than Women". New York Times. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  15. ↑ "Episode 33 – Erica Baker (Part 2)". Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  16. ↑ Meredith L. Patterson (2015-12-21). "Totalizing Politics and Insurance Rackets". Status 451. Retrieved 2018-04-05.
  17. ↑ Isaac, Mike (May 3, 2016). "Women in Tech Band Together to Track Diversity, After Hours". New York Times. Retrieved November 18, 2017.
  18. ↑ Bort, Julia. "The 39 most powerful female engineers of 2018". Business Insider. Retrieved 21 June 2018.
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