Airbnb on has 50 engineers?

And 12 of them are women?

Those are both surprising.

Colleen Taylor writes that tech companies want more women:

Judging by the job fair section at the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of women in computing held this past week in Minneapolis, it was very clear that all the hottest companies in tech are workingas hard as ever to hire more engineers — and if they happen to be female, all the better. After all, though women make up half the population, they are notoriously under-represented in science and engineering jobs.

So TechCrunch TV took a lap around the job fair at Hopper to talk to a number of the companies there about why they’d like to see more women in their engineering ranks. Their responses made it clear that it’s not that tech companies are looking to blindly fulfill some kind of gender quota — they’re simply looking to build the best products they can. Dropbox engineerAlicia Chen put it this way:

“When you create new products, having differences in background helps you surface more issues that your users might face, and just generally create better ideas. It’s really at the boundary of two spheres where the best ideas emerge. So just having people of different backgrounds working together means that we’re coming up with better material.”