Year in, Year Out

Today, we are proud to announce that we have achieved gender pay parity in the U.S., paying women $1.00 for every $1.00 earned by men. This fulfills the milestone we first outlined at our second annual Adobe & Women Leadership Summit in September.

This week Great Place to Work and Fortune also named Adobe on their list of Best Workplaces for Diversity, where we came in at no. 27 out of 100 companies. And the week before, USA Today listed Adobe as a Top 25 Company for Diversity.

We are pleased with our progress in 2017:

Building more pathways to tech

Adobe’s future employees are the youth of today, and not enough of them are pursuing technical careers. So, this year we continued and added new partnerships with several organizations to expand access to education and real-world experience in the fields of technology and creative design.

Through our Youth Coding Initiative, we partnered with 10 organizations—up from eight last year—to train youth with valuable, marketable technical skills. We also doubled our funding for Girls Who Code, which enabled us to host five summer immersion programs for girls and dedicate more than 100 employee mentors and full-time teachers combined.

And through the Adobe Digital Academy, we partnered with General Assembly to offer low-income, underrepresented minorities scholarships in Web and Android Development Immersive courses. Year-to-date, we’ve hired 12 talented employees from the program.

Attracting diverse candidates

In order to increase the number of qualified women and underrepresented minorities we hire, we implemented new strategies and practices. Some ways we doubled down on this were:

• Increased partnerships at our target universities with affinity groups and organizations that promote engineering and computer science with female and underrepresented minority talent.
• Taking part in a number of new conferences and partnership opportunities such as the Lesbians Who Tech conference.
• Highlighting Adobe’s own women in technology through our video series to encourage women to consider careers in technology.
• Utilizing a third-party tool to reexamine our job descriptions to make sure they were diverse and inclusive.

Enhancing the Adobe Life experience for all

For our employees, we offer a myriad of communities, development programs, and benefits designed to support and celebrate our diverse workforce. In order to do this, this year we:

• Added enhanced leave benefits to 19 countries, which includes up to six months of fully paid leave for new parents.
• Introduced the “Welcome Back” program for U.S. employees returning from leave, which helps employees transition back into the workplace after extended leave with part-time, flex-time or work-from-home options.
• Introduced Breaking Bias training for all our employees to raise awareness about unconscious bias and how to mitigate it in decision making situations like hiring.
• Welcomed more than 1,400 employees globally to our second annual Adobe & Women Leadership Summit.
• Participated in Pride Parades across the world, all while spreading the message of Unity, Love and Strength.
• Increased focus on growing Communities@Adobe to better connect employees with similar interest and passions through our Employee Networks and Employee Clubs.

Although we are proud of all the achievements and progress we made this year, there is still a lot more to be done.

We have a number of new initiatives and programs lined up, and with 2018 on the horizon, we could not be more excited to see the company and our employees continue to grow. #AdobeForAll

This story originally appeared on the Adobe Life blog.