Dive Brief:

• Several female Silicon Valley leaders are working together on a new nonprofit venture called Project Include.

• The project is working to collect and share data in an effort to diversify companies' employees. 

• The group includes female leaders from companies like Google, Pinterest, Stripe and Slack.

Dive Insight:

Project Include hopes to speed up tech’s glacial approach to improving diversity. The group wants to help tech companies more easily track the diversity of their workforces so they can make concrete plans for improvements.

The lack of women in technology has been well documented. According to a report released in September by IT Certification and Security Experts, only 10% of professionals are women in the growing and increasingly important field of cybersecurity. In technology overall, women comprise about one-third of the workforce, according to a recent analysis of nine major tech companies by Fortune. And the higher up you go, the worse it gets.

Several tech firms have begun releasing diversity data over the last few years, and those numbers confirm that white males dominate most tech companies today.

"The standard mantra for every company on diversity statistics is, 'We’re not doing well, but we’re working on it,'" said Ellen Pao, a former venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, in an interview with the New York Times. "People don’t learn anything from that. Can you tell us what are you actually doing?"

Last summer, President Obama called on tech companies to improve diversity, declaring that businesses must become more inclusive if the tech sector can continue to thrive.

After releasing statistics showing a general lack of diversity among their workers, several tech companies, including Microsoft, Intel and HP, last year vowed to double their efforts at promoting more diverse workplaces, though results of those efforts are yet to be seen.