We share a belief at Pivotal that creativity, innovation, and the ability to tackle hard engineering problems are enhanced by different ideas, views, and experiences.
Last year at Pivotal that was about setting a course of action to move forward on diversity and inclusion. In March 2016, we published our company data on the breakdown between gender and ethnicity. In October 2016, we demystified how Pivotal compensates employees, and disclosed data on pay by gender and ethnicity. We also took the White House pay pledge to fortify Pivotal’s commitment to pay equality and transparency.
Fostering an environment that’s diverse, inclusive, and buzzing with creativity and collaboration takes commitment, focus, and data. Releasing that data has had a powerful effect on our company. It gave everyone a shared context to better understand where we are, and more importantly where we need to go.
In 2016 we learned that diversity and inclusion is not an initiative. Rather, it’s one of the many important things we do continuously, across the company. Another valuable lesson is that meaningful strides towards a more diverse and inclusive workplace can be made when leaders back up pledges with resources and sponsorship. We also learned that there is no singular approach to fostering diversity across our 20 offices worldwide—when local teams self-organize on grassroots efforts, they reinforce a collective culture of inclusion.
So how are we doing?
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From March 2016 (when we first released our diversity data) through December 2016, we saw approximately a 2% increase in the proportion of female Pivotal employees. 2.7% and 1.4% more women have assumed technical and management roles, respectively.
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While we have slightly more employees from the Hispanic and Latino community, and a 0.5% increase in Pivotal employees in the US who are Black since March of 2016, we have a ways to go before we can say that we have a representative community for both groups.
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Most of Pivotal’s 20 global offices have formal Diversity & Inclusion programs, each funded by a budget set up for D&I initiatives, which they each allocate as they see fit. Teams have funded community events, films, reunion dinners with former Girls Who Code cohorts, and tech mentoring sessions like #YesWeCode for young men and women from underrepresented groups.
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We reexamined our hiring processes in 2016, and have run implicit bias trainings for some 130 leaders and Pivots who are part of the hiring cycle to establish patterns and pipelines that facilitate diversity.
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In the second half of 2016, 33% of global new hires were women; in the US, 17% of new hires were from under-represented ethnicities (non-white/non-asian).
All of this puts diversity and inclusion into focus. I believe that diversity at Pivotal will continue to gather strength through acknowledgment, action, and continued focus on Pivotal’s bedrock values: to do the right thing, to do what works, and to be kind.
Pivotal has a ways to go in some areas, but we continue to have a clear view of what we need to do, and we have the momentum, support and focus to move forward.
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