Earlier today Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong shared with employees an update on Glassdoor’s efforts and progress to drive for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion at Glassdoor and beyond. Below is a copy of Christian’s email to employees.
Hi everyone,
Thank you for joining me at today’s All Hands. I want to take a moment to reiterate our commitment and the steps we are taking to drive equity in the workplace. Our vision is a world where transparency ensures everyone is treated equitably and where greater transparency empowers companies to become better employers.
In 2020, Glassdoor made a commitment to do more to foster greater diversity, equity and inclusion within our own company and in society, through transparency and through action. This is why I am following up one year later, in the spirit of transparency, to share the progress we’ve seen, the steps Glassdoor has taken and the steps we still need to take to create a more equitable workplace for underrepresented groups, here at Glassdoor and across workplaces everywhere.
One year into our five year plan, we are seeing some strong signs of progress, but there’s still significant room for growth and improvement. As this year’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Transparency Report shows, the diversity of our employee base is relatively flat year over year. We made some great strides in hiring among underrepresented groups, but as this was happening, we also saw higher levels of attrition among these same groups. While change takes time, a key learning heading into this next year and beyond is to focus more on retaining underrepresented talent in particular. I know we can do better and we have new plans in place to improve.
Among areas of progress, I’m proud that we’ve grown our ERG community by adding ADEPT (Advocates for Disability Education, Partnership and Talent) and investing further in supporting our other five ERGs, while enhancing our learning, development and education programs. With our efforts over this past year, we have learned a lot and established a solid foundation we can build upon.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Transparency Report*. Last year, we published our goals for 2025, and described where we were starting this five-year journey. Our vision is that our workforce should be reflective of the communities in which we operate as well as the users we serve. Our goals for gender balance are based on general averages in the countries where we currently have employees; our race/ethnicity goals are based on the U.S. population
Today, we are publishing our second annual Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Transparency Report. So, where are we on our 2025 goals? We’re seeing strong signals of progress, but there is still significant work to do.
Here is where we stand today:
- Black employee representation is currently at 5%. We want to have at least 8% representation by the end of 2025.
- Latinx employee representation is currently at 4%. We want to have at least 10% representation.
- Pacific Islander/ Native Hawaiian/ Indigenous American/ Alaska Native employee representation is currently at less than 1%. We want to have at least 1% representation.
- Women in tech roles are currently at 25%. We want to have at least 33% of our tech roles held by women.
- Women in leadership roles (director+) are currently at 36%. We want to have at least 50% of our leadership roles held by women.
- We want all of our employees to feel that they belong at Glassdoor. To guide us to that goal, we set a target of 78% or more of our employees to state that they “feel a sense of belonging at Glassdoor”, as measured by our employee polling tool. We are currently at 81%.
In addition, this year, we are committing to a new goal to meet by the end of 2025, which is to have at least 15% of our leadership team (director+) identify as belonging to an underrepresented racial/ethnic group (specifically Black, Latinx and Pacific Islander/ Native Hawaiian/ Indigenous American/ Alaska Native). We are currently at 3%.
To learn more about Glassdoor’s employee population data, our diversity, equity, and inclusion goals, and how we’re progressing towards these goals, please read the blog post from Carina Cortez, Glassdoor’s Chief People Officer.
Annual Pay Equity Analysis. We believe transparency is one of the most important tools to ensure everyone is paid fairly and equitably. In addition to holding ourselves accountable by sharing our employee population data and diversity goals, it is also important that we embrace pay transparency to ensure every employee at Glassdoor is compensated equitably. So, each year, Glassdoor’s Economic Research Team conducts a pay equity analysis on Glassdoor’s own workforce in order to assess our own pay practices and ensure that they in fact are equitable with respect to gender and race/ethnicity.
The results of our analysis found no statistically significant pay gap among Glassdoor’s U.S.-based employees when comparing across similar roles, levels of experience, gender and race/ethnicity. This is the sixth consecutive year that Glassdoor has found no gender pay gap in its analysis, and the third year that Glassdoor has examined and found no pay gap by race/ethnicity. Our efforts will not stop here. We are committed to preventing any pay gap based on gender or race/ethnicity and will continue to ensure that each and every employee is compensated fairly. Read more about the analysis and findings.
Our Product: Transparency to Drive Equity. As the worldwide leader in insights about jobs and companies, we believe our product and platform represent our greatest opportunity to make an impact and drive societal change. Last year, we made it a priority to put together a plan and build new products to highlight diversity and empower companies to better understand how their employees view their diversity efforts. In doing so, we want to help them act more effectively in becoming more diverse and inclusive organizations. As you know, we launched several product features last fall and even more earlier this year. So far, the response to these features has been incredibly exciting to see. In less than a year, Glassdoor has collected more than 3.2 million D&I ratings from employees at more than half a million companies. In addition, we have collected more than 1.8 million demographic insights from over 440,000 U.S. employees at more than 4,000 companies. And we are continuing to see more demographic growth. Employers including Walmart, Amazon, Target, Starbucks, Wells Fargo and Accenture are among the companies whose employees have contributed the most demographic information. Millions of people are now coming to Glassdoor and seeing company ratings, CEO ratings and workplace factor ratings by race/ethnicity, gender identity, parental or caregiver status, disability, sexual orientation and veteran status, in addition to being able to see salaries broken out by gender identity and race/ethnicity. Employers have also embraced these product updates, with more than 5,000 employers publicly sharing their diversity programs, initiatives and commitments on Glassdoor, showing potential job candidates how they’re building a more diverse and inclusive workforce and culture.
Community Impact. We believe we also have a responsibility to create positive change in our communities. Since last year, Glassdoor’s volunteering and giving program, Community Door, has been focused exclusively on addressing systemic barriers to employment that exist for underrepresented groups. In particular, we want to help companies better support underrepresented groups by providing toolkits to help them hire and retain diverse talent. We’ve invested and donated resources, time, and funds to programs and organizations aligned with the goal of making equity in the workplace a reality. Finally, we’ve also been leveraging our expertise to host virtual events, workshops, and more to inspire employees and employers to join us in driving towards an equitable workplace for all.
While we are proud of the progress we’ve made, there is still much work to be done. We are fully committed to embracing transparency and holding ourselves accountable to the change we want to see in the workplace and in the world.
Christian
*Methodology:
- Glassdoor’s 2021 employee population and demographic data is as of June 30, 2021 and based on internal data shared voluntarily by Glassdoor employees.
- Race/ethnicity data represents U.S. workforce only in light of relevant European privacy laws.
- In some cases, percentages for certain fields may not equal 100% due to employees choosing not to disclose certain demographic information. In addition, in some cases, percentages may exceed 100% due to rounding.