Staying accountable.
June 26, 2020
Huge is driven by its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We aspire to be catalysts for change and to create a world where our people, clients, and users have equal opportunities to create, build, and grow — strengthened by diversity of thought, background, and perspective. So in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and the global protests that have followed and continue, we also made a public statement of support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But statements are not enough. That’s why we have protested, we have donated, and we have listened with open hearts and minds. We have listened to our employees, experts, and our industry. We were encouraged seeing the list of demands made by 600 & Rising that aligned closely to our goals. This is a shared commitment.
Seeing so many come together to demand an end to systemic racism has inspired us and made us optimistic that collectively we can accomplish massive progress for our countries, our culture, and our company. It has also led us to recognize that it is our time to help carry the mantle, or in the words of Feminista Jones and others, to be “co-conspirators or accomplices, not allies.”
Our public statement closed with this sentence, “We’re not asking anyone to tell us what we can do. All we ask, is that you hold us accountable.” We believe the first step towards accountability is transparency, so today we are sharing the breakdown of our U.S. employees by gender and ethnicity. At the beginning of the year, we made the commitment to share this data with our employees every 6 months and we are now committing to sharing it publicly once each year.
The data below paints a clear picture that we have more work to do. As our mission says, we believe that diversity of thought, background, and perspective are all critical to creating the work environment and the world that we want. We have not gone far enough to create a workplace where everyone can do the best work of their lives, which starts with bringing their whole selves to work. We recognize that this simple statement is extremely difficult to achieve, yet we will not waiver in our pursuit of the objective.
To put some teeth into our commitment, today we are committing to increase the share of both Women and BIPOC by 25% at the Executive levels within two years. This is not all we will do, but we felt it important to put a clear measurable objective out there.
Today, we’re sharing the Current State data that we have. In the future, we will go further.
Current State.
1. Overall U.S. employee base by gender and ethnicity.
As you can see from the data, we are close to evenly split by gender, something we plan to evolve to be more inclusive of our non-binary people. In the second pie chart, you can see we are 30% BIPOC (Black Indigenous People Of Color) and 70% white.
2. Breakdown by race/ethnicity.
The upper chart shows the breakdown at another layer of detail. Again, we are 70% white, but you can also see that we are 7% Black, 9% Hispanic, 12% Asian and 2% two or more races.
The lower chart shows the intersectionality between ethnicity and gender (again not accounting for a world that is less binary). You can see that we skew more male with our White employees and more female with our Black, Hispanic, and Asian employees.
3. Gender representation by seniority.
This chart represents the gender breakdown at three levels of seniority in the organization. The lower bar represents the Leads and below, which is our largest group within the organization, and skews female. The middle bar represents our managers, which is our second biggest group, and this is evenly split by gender. The top bar represents our executives, which skew decidedly male and this is a glaring problem that is being addressed.
4. Race / ethnicity representation by seniority.
Similar to gender, this chart shows that we have made the most progress to “right the ratio” of People of Color at the Lead and below levels (the bottom bar). At both the Manager and Executive levels (mid and top bar), we skew heavily white and clearly we have a lot of work to do to improve our diversity.
5. New Hires.
As we look at 2019 and 2020 new hires, you will see that 2019 hiring was right in line with the overall population from a gender perspective and that in 2020, we hired 57% females, which is 5 points higher than the overall current population at Huge.
You will have undoubtedly noticed that the above data does not include LGBTQ+ status, veteran status, and disability status. These communities have meaningfully contributed to Huge since its inception and play an active role in our culture and in our work. Legal restrictions have previously barred us from collecting more data on these communities, but moving forward our team is assessing ways to incorporate more inclusive reporting where all of our people are represented. This will also allow us to provide more data cuts that go beyond binaries in the future and are more intersectional.
Updating how we collect and share information about our employees is just one part of our ongoing action plan for ending systemic racism at Huge. Because racism is broad, systemic, and deeply embedded in ways that impact society as well as our industry, we do not believe that any plan or roadmap can or should be finite. It must be iterative, ongoing, and evolve over time. So while we have defined several key initiatives and are making a long-term commitment to change our hiring practices, evolve our culture, update how we work, who we partner with, and take greater action in our communities, we will continue to listen and learn. Again, we are humbly focused on making an impact that will be broad and long lasting. We will regularly share our Roadmap with our employees, and you, our partners, clients, and friends will see the outcomes and feel the impact.
We are open. We take chances. We inspire others. We Give a Shit. We do the right thing. These are our values, and have been for years. We don’t shy away from change, even when we turn the lens on ourselves. Thank you for holding us accountable.