Women at Adobe: A Year of Progress

In honor of International Women’s Day, we at Adobe are marking our progress — and areas of continued opportunity — relative to driving better gender balance and engagement in our workplace.

We’re pleased to announce that our global gender mix improved across all reported segments in the fiscal year (FY) 2018:

This positive movement is rewarding, especially given the scale of our 20,000+ global workforce. But we still have a significant opportunity ahead of us to fully achieve the International Women’s Day aspiration of a gender-balanced world: #BalanceForBetter. To build a pipeline for the future, as well as attract and retain outstanding female talent for today, we made some key investments this past year:

Investing in the future: To ensure a robust pipeline of future technical women, we need to get them excited about pursuing computer science and other STEM fields. In addition to our ongoing commitment to Girls Who Code and Technovation, in 2018 we joined the Reboot Representation Tech Coalition along with other industry leaders. The coalition’s goal is to double the number of black, Latina, and Native American women graduating with computing degrees in the U.S. by 2025.

Ensuring pay parity: After a long and painstaking process, we achieved global pay parity in October. This has delivered an important signal to our employees that we care about fair pay practices. Our next chapter will be opportunity parity, examining fairness in advancement and lateral movement across demographic groups.

Helping new moms and moms-to-be: We spend significant time and energy to support our employees’ family life outside of work, as well as their return to work. In the U.S., for women who used our fertility benefits last year, the average coverage amount was $9,500. Our Welcome Back program provides a transition for employees returning from leave, including new moms, with the option for flexible work schedules and arrangements to assist with their reintegration into work. Adobe moms traveling for work sent home 59 gallons of breast milk via Milk Stork, allowing their infants to continue to receive fresh and nutritious sustenance even from afar.

Supporting families: Our employees’ families come in all varieties, and parents’ need for help and support crosses gender lines. Last year, we had a higher number of male employees taking parental leave globally compared to female employees. That makes sense given that our workforce is still majority male — nevertheless, it’s great to see that men can take that time they need to support their newborns or newly adopted family members. This year, we have expanded U.S. parental leave for non-birth parents to 16 weeks of fully paid leave. Once parents are back to work, our backup care (covering time when a family’s regular child care is unavailable) continues to be popular. Our parents used more than 12,000 hours last year!

Driving learning and growth: Both women and men at Adobe seek to continually grow in their careers, and we have a variety of ways we support them. One of the most exciting new developments in late 2018 was the introduction of our Learning Fund, which offers $10,000 annually to use toward certifications and accredited degree programs, as well as an extra $1,000 annually to use toward conferences, webinars, one-day courses, etc. to pursue developmental goals.

Pushing for change: At Adobe, we recognize that not all companies can provide benefits and programs like Adobe can. That is why we push for social initiatives like the FAMILY Act, which would create an affordable and self-sustaining family and medical leave insurance fund. In addition, we actively participate in working groups focused on advancing workplace gender equity issues including paid leave, equal pay, and sexual harassment through internal change, culture change, and/or public policy change to move the industry forward.

For us at Adobe, the diversity and inclusion conversation extends far beyond gender. Adobe For All is about valuing all the ways we are different — race, ethnicity, ability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and so many other dimensions. Fortunately, we have found that the programs and investments that are great for women tend to have a much broader “halo effect” to drive diversity and inclusion broadly. #BalanceForBetter should be about driving change on International Women’s Day but also well beyond it. Let’s celebrate our progress and resolve to do even more next year.