Diversity, inclusion, and belonging at GitHub in 2023

Being the home for 100 million developers is a privilege and responsibility. As part of our company mission to accelerate human progress through developer collaboration, we are dedicated to supporting a developer community that reflects the world we live in, as well as championing diversity across our employee base.

2023 was a unique hiring year for GitHub, with slower employee growth due to the macroeconomic climate. We doubled down on our holistic Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DI&B) strategy—across people, philanthropy, policy, and platform—to expand our progress, perspectives, and responsibility to the world.

People: Supporting Hubbers

Over the past several years, GitHub’s diversity hiring grew proportionally to its overall hiring. This year was no exception. We experienced growth in the number of Asian, Latinx, Black, and Multiracial Hubbers—increasing race and ethnicity representation by 8.61%.

Our commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce, where every Hubber is enabled to do their best work, remains strong. This year, we continued to evolve our remote-first, employee engagement programs to include Hubber Hangouts, a program for Hubbers in the same vicinity to form in-person connections; GitHub Engineering IRL, where engineering Hubbers—75% joining at the start of the pandemic!—can finally meet each other in person; and Bagel, an app that enables Hubbers to pair with each other virtually and form new connections across the company.

Philanthropy: Paying it forward

Creating an inclusive open source community necessitates giving back. Our social impact team connected individuals from historically underrepresented backgrounds to the research-backed tools, training, and support needed to join and thrive in open source. In 2021, we launched the All In for Students pilot—designed to be an intimate, hands-on, and customizable program—with 30 students from seven universities. And in 2023, we scaled to reach 405 students from 112 universities and colleges across the U.S.

We also launched two programs as part of our All In for Maintainers initiative: the All In for Maintainers DEI Resource Hub, which empowers maintainers with the tools and information they need to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within their communities; and the All In CHAOSS Badging Initiative.

When building All In for Maintainers, we conducted a maintainers listening tour and survey to better understand the state of inclusivity today. A key finding from our research was that maintainers have no way of identifying communities and projects who exemplified best practices for DEI work within their communities. The All In CHAOSS DEI Badging Initiative, in partnership with CHAOSS, is our first step towards solving this problem. The program allows open source maintainers to signal their ongoing efforts to improve and prioritize DEI within their communities and have the ability to recognize those who are leading the way.

Policy: Empowering developers

To advocate for developers everywhere, we believe that policy should enable all developers to do their best work. This is why equal opportunity is one of three pillars that drives all of our policy advocacy. Developers play a crucial role in building digital resilience, which is why we were proud to join the Copenhagen Pledge, a commitment to make digital technologies work for democracy and human rights. We’ve also continued our efforts to make our platform as broadly available as possible. Additionally, we commissioned research from Tattle, which found that researchers in the international development, public policy, and economic fields were interested in using GitHub data but faced barriers in obtaining and using it. To lower those barriers, we launched the GitHub Innovation Graph, which provides longitudinal metrics on software development for economies across the globe.

Platform: Addressing barriers for those with disabilities

In 2023, GitHub made significant investments to improve accessibility and disability inclusion globally, with a goal of promoting innovation from all communities. We created a head of accessibility role and hired a blind developer with lived experiences who informs our understanding and brings the diversity efforts taking place across GitHub into a cohesive multi-year strategy. We published our vision to empower developers with disabilities to contribute to software development and realize the goal of “nothing about us without us” with respect to technology.

A few notable highlights include improvements within the GitHub Global Campus that remove barriers for students with disabilities, improvements within GitHub Copilot that enable more developers with disabilities to leverage the power of artificial intelligence, and color contrast improvements across GitHub.com. We launched a new video series on coding accessibility and published articles on the ReadME Project, which amplify the voices of disabled developers. In the future, we are particularly excited about the possibility of AI to improve inclusion and opportunities for people with disabilities.

Looking ahead

Going forward, we’re focused on enhancing our employee experience for all Hubbers, especially with our remote-first culture in mind. This involves building loyalty and preference for GitHub as a career destination, enabling employees to grow in their personal and professional lives through career advancement, and enhancing inclusive practices throughout our ecosystems.

Written by

Marie Carasco

@mcarasco

VP, Organization Development, Culture & Diversity