In September of 2018, I wrote about our ambitions for diversity in engineering for the next six months and committed to another post in March 2019 sharing how we did. By sharing our learnings, we hope to encourage others to build a more diverse and inclusive team. In lieu of a typical blog post, I’d like to instead share an email that I wrote to our engineering team last month.
You’ll see (1) how we did, (2) our aspirations for the next six months, and (3) a new way of working to help us along the way. The email is only slightly edited, mainly to remove Gusto-specific jargon and update our most recent numbers (the current column).
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From: Eddie To: Gusto Engineering
Subject: [FYI] Our Engineering Diversity & Belonging Aspirations and Approach
Hi team,
As you know by now, we’re committed to building a diverse and inclusive engineering team. As a reminder of why, we have three primary reasons:
- Better for the business: A more diverse team will help us build better products for our diverse set of customers.
- Better for the team: Diversity is important for a good engineering culture and increased work happiness. We want to hire and work with the best people.
- Better for the world: It’s the right thing to do. We see ourselves as part of a greater community with a shared responsibility to make the world a better place.
We’ve come a very long way since we started this journey back in 2015. Overall, 32% of our engineering team (defined as those in our software engineering and information security teams) comes from an under-represented group (URG). At Gusto Engineering, we define an individual as coming from an URG if they identify as a woman, non-binary, Black, Latinx, American Indian, Alaska Native, trans, or a non-binary person.
As you may know, we had hoped to increase diversity in our senior engineering positions (L3+). Six months ago, only about 9% of our senior engineers came from an URG. Today, that number is 18%.
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Here are some other diversity statistics that you should feel proud of:
- As stated before, 32% of our engineering team comes from a URG.
- Our voluntary attrition rate for women engineers since 2016 is still zero.
- 41% of recently-promoted engineers were women.
We’re making progress, but we still have a long way to go. And we’re not taking our foot off the pedal now!
We spent the last month thinking long and hard about how we can scale our efforts. In the end, we’ve decided to shift the Engineering Diversity & Belonging Committee from a workstream model to an accountability model. That is, instead of the committee organizing much of the work themselves, we’ll help teams set and reach their diversity and belonging aspirations.
Through this approach, we hope to partner with the teams inside Gusto that can have the most impact. By doing so, we hope to (1) increase diversity in our senior engineering positions from 18% to 25% over the next 6 months and (2) make this amazing team a place where everyone feels that they belong.
Thank you for all your continued support for the Engineering Diversity and Belonging Committee. If you have any feedback or suggestions on how we can improve, please let us know by joining our Slack channel, or come by our bi-weekly meeting.
Below, you’ll find what we’ve decided to focus on in the Engineering organization:
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¹30% may not seem very aggressive at first glance. However, we feel more comfortable with this due to available URG representation for our currently open positions (of which 85% are for senior engineers).
²Negative percentage indicates the number is in favor of non-URG. Positive numbers indicates the numbers is in favor of URG.
³We recently exceeded our aspirations here! We’ll continue to push ourselves to achieve greater equality here and adjust our aspirations accordingly in the future.
⁴Answered “agree” or “strongly” agree. Other possible answers are “strongly disagree”, “disagree” and “neutral”.