Diversity, inclusion, and belonging at GitHub in 2024

At GitHub, diversity isn’t just a metric we track—it’s the fuel that powers our innovation.

With a goal to be the home of one billion developers, we remain committed to creating an inclusive environment where every voice is heard and every background is valued. In 2024, our Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DI&B) strategy remained robust, as we supported the diversity of both our employees and the greater developer community.

This blog highlights our ongoing efforts and progress this past year, as we strive to build a more equitable company and tech industry. Together, we can create a future where everyone has the opportunity to contribute, collaborate, and thrive.

Talent, tools, and transformation

Over the past year, we’ve maintained our commitment to a diverse workforce. In the U.S., there was a steady increase in our U.S. Asian population of +1.0 percentage points. We also saw an increase of +0.2 percentage points in our U.S. Hispanic and Latinx populations. Globally, we increased the number of women represented from the previous year by +1.4 percentage points.

We also maintained our focus on empowering a pipeline of employees to grow professionally and personally. We built out the GitHub Early in Profession program for individuals who have less than three years of professional experience. Our GitHub Intern Program, designed to recruit university talent for potential full-time roles after graduation, grew by 184% from last fiscal year. Additionally, 38% of our U.S. intern cohort were women, and 41% were Hispanic/Latino or African American/Black.

These programs foster an inclusive workforce, supporting talent as the company scales.

Community, code, and culture

Here at GitHub, we know it’s not just about us—we have a responsibility to help the greater community access the goodness of open source and tech. To that end, we delivered impactful programs, collaborated with key partners, and supported thousands of individuals worldwide.

In 2024, we skilled more than 1,700 learners through the Social Impact team’s depth-driven programming of open source curriculum, hackathons, virtual leadership and mentorship opportunities, and more. In addition, together with Major League Hacking, we distributed $20,000 in grants to fund over 30 events, supporting 2,500 learners to develop hands-on experience as a part of career pathing in open source. We also launched All In Africa. This initiative is dedicated to making open source education accessible to everyone across the continent. It also supports a future where open source projects and global tech companies can tap into an expanding skilled workforce and meet the demands of a rapidly evolving tech landscape while furthering the prosperity of African economies.

At GitHub, we have nine Communities of Belonging (CoB) that help nurture our culture. These communities support a positive employee experience by generating energy within their respective groups and across the company. They create safe spaces for employees to connect and be supported personally and professionally, while also providing opportunities for members to lead diversity initiatives that align with the business’ innovation and corporate social responsibility goals. In all, our CoBs cultivate a culture of inclusion, connection, and shared growth—ensuring everyone at GitHub can thrive.

Voices, vision, and values

AI is changing the world of software, and we’re committed to ensuring that developers can benefit from it without contributing to societal harms. As such, 2024 has been a defining year for supporting responsible AI programs. We joined the AI Elections Accord, a cross-industry initiative to combat the deceptive use of AI in elections (see our progress update for more). GitHub co-hosted a workshop on responsible practices for open source AI with the Partnership on AI, which led to a report on risk mitigation strategies for the open foundation model value chain.

We have also continued our broad support of research and data that advances the understanding of developers’ contributions to innovation, development, and societal resilience throughout the world. Following the launch of the GitHub Innovation Graph, we now have four full years of data available for anyone to analyze and explore, and have made clarifying updates in response to feedback. In our most recent data release, we featured a conversation with economic researchers who are using GitHub Innovation Graph data to estimate the impact of generative AI tools on software development activity.

Innovation, inclusion, and impact

As the world’s home for open source and the greater developer community, we ensure that everyone can use their ingenuity and creativity to build great things—including those with disabilities. In 2024, we continued to invest in accessibility as one of our engineering fundamentals, which serves as the foundation for accessibility governance at GitHub. Our new Accessibility Design Bootcamp, completed by over 50% of our design team so far, provided exercises and discussions to raise awareness of web accessibility best practices and to empower designers to create more accessible products. In addition, we launched company-wide accessibility training and continued to improve on our accessible interview process globally. Finally, we continued to amplify the voices of disabled developers by publishing another four installments of the Coding Accessibility series and the accessibility playlist on our YouTube channel.

Continuing our journey together

Looking ahead, our priority is to further enrich the employee experience at GitHub, as well as help create a more inclusive and diverse industry. We’ll continue to provide learning, education, networking, and social impact opportunities to our employees. Also on our roadmap, we’ll partner with open source programs worldwide, nurture our CoBs, lead the change in leveraging AI ethically, support research that advances our understanding of the greater developer community, and create more accessible software. We’re excited to reach even more developers and the innovation opportunities that will inevitably arise. Together, let’s build what’s next.

Written by

Justin Thenutai

@jt-githubhr

Justin Thenutai is the Chief People Officer for GitHub. Justin has spent 16+ years in HR leadership at Microsoft, leading HR teams for a broad portfolio of Engineering organizations, including Windows, Surface, Mixed Reality, Device Operations, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Mesh, Data Platform + Growth, and Viva. His passion lies in helping people be at their best to generate the best possible outcomes.