The GitHub Diversity Report

Today I am pleased to share our second annual Diversity Report. While we are working every day internally to make GitHub the most inclusive company it can possibly be, this report represents our commitment to the community to be transparent and accountable for continued progress.

This year, we saw growth across key indices as we welcomed more employees from a wide range of backgrounds into the company. Most specifically, we experienced a 2% growth in each of our Black and Asian communities and doubled our percentage of transgender and genderqueer employees (from 1% to 2%). We are extremely proud of this growth, and it is a result of commitments we made last year—commitments to improving our hiring practices and to our community partners who help keep the pipeline robust. While we are cautiously optimistic about our progress year-over-year, there is still a long way to go toward better representation in our company and in the entire sector.

One interesting data point we examined this year is around retention. As we look at our overall attrition rates, there is no significant difference among gender, race, or ethnicity in terms of who is staying with or leaving the company. This is a metric we will continue to keep an eye on and one that we will use to hold ourselves accountable as we build a more inclusive culture. We encourage other companies to do the same.

There are still places where we have more concentrated work to do. Specifically, we lost a percentage point in women in leadership. In addition, we would have liked to have seen stronger growth of people of color in leadership roles beyond a 2% gain.

Something I am proud to announce as part of our overall efforts is the creation of an Office of Employee Experience and Engagement, which will be led by Merritt Anderson. This office will be responsible for employee advocacy, diversity and inclusion, learning and development, and overall workplace experience. In her leadership position as a VP, Merritt will sit on the executive team and we will work together to improve the full experience of GitHub employees from recruitment through the end of their tenure. We continue to commit ourselves to improving employee experience for all people from all backgrounds. This builds on the good work of the Social Impact Team, a team that has strengthened us as a company over the past two years.

You can toggle through the report below to compare our progress year-over-year. My statement from last year can be found here.

Onward,

Chris Wanstrath

Written by

Chris Wanstrath

@defunkt