Opportunity Parity: The Next Diversity & Inclusion Challenge

Today at the MAKERS Conference, we announced the next chapter in our journey to make Adobe an inclusive and rewarding place for employees from every background. This year, we will examine “opportunity parity” which we are defining as fairness in internal movement and advancement across demographic groups.

Opportunity parity builds on Adobe’s achievement of global pay parity last year. We define pay parity as ensuring that employees in the same job and location are paid fairly to one another, regardless of their gender or ethnicity. While the concept of pay equality is often debated and discussed, it took us significant time and investment to determine how to objectively measure fairness within Adobe’s rewards environment. (We have shared details of that approach on our diversity site.) In the end, our necessary financial adjustments were very modest; but the impact for our employees of knowing we were ensuring fairness was huge.

Now that pay parity has become an integral part of our ongoing employee practices, our next challenge is ensuring our practices provide fair opportunities for every employee to grow and develop in our organization. When it comes to opportunity, we believe there are two visible outcomes:

• Advancement: Employees moving into roles with increased scope and impact: “internal promotions”
• Movement: Employees moving into different roles across the organization: “internal lateral job moves”

These outcomes result from many factors, including employees’ access to learning and development, coaching and effective feedback; their own ambitions relative to movement and advancement; the organization’s need and availability of these roles; and open and fair internal processes.

To the best of our knowledge, there isn’t any clear industry standard for how to measure or address opportunity parity. So as part of our ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion, we are going to take on this challenge for Adobe. We are hopeful that we will share our learnings with other companies as well, as we experiment and refine this initiative over time.

Every employee deserves the chance to feel respected, valued and capable of achieving individual potential, and we believe the focus on opportunity parity will ensure that we are doing everything we can do to make that possible.