Another step forward: Adobe pay and opportunity parity

Last week we hosted our first-ever Adobe for All Week, a virtual reimagination of the Adobe For All Summit we held for the past two years. We hosted the event against a backdrop of some of the most challenging times that many of us have faced: A global pandemic, the isolation of working and schooling from home, highly visible incidents of racial injustice, and a world that feels more divided than united.

The good news is that despite all of these challenges, companies can still drive forward on their diversity and inclusion commitments, and our Adobe team is doing that. We marked another milestone this week by releasing new information on our pay parity and opportunity parity efforts.

Pay parity

We first announced that we achieved global gender pay parity in October 2018, and we’re pleased to affirm that we have maintained that gender pay parity again this year. Even more exciting is a new announcement on race/ethnicity: In the U.S. we have achieved pay parity between employees from underrepresented minority (URM) groups and non-URM employees. Adobe considers Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or employees of two or more races as URM employees.

We had previously disclosed that non-white employees were paid as much as white employees; however, this affirmation of URM and non-URM pay parity is new and we hope it provides a more helpful level of transparency and understanding to our employees from the URM population to see this data more distinctly.

As a core element of our pay parity work, we analyzed pay for employees in the same job and location and made a small number of adjustments to employees’ pay based on that review. The global pay adjustments made this year impacted less than 0.5% of Adobe employees and less than 0.03% of global payroll costs.

We plan to update our gender and U.S. race/ethnicity pay parity data annually.

Opportunity parity

We first introduced the concept of opportunity parity early last year – examining fairness in promotions and horizontal movement among demographic groups. To the best of our knowledge, no companies have approached a metric like this. It has been quite a journey, starting with how to accurately measure these dynamics and leading up to our newest disclosures.

After a lot of work to ensure a robust methodology, we are now able to share both promotion and horizontal movement metrics, both by gender and U.S. race/ethnicity. Similar to our approach to pay parity, we are using a U.S. URM/non-URM distinction for the race/ethnicity insights.

The chart below shows our employee internal movement data for FY2020 through Q3 (December 2019 – August 2020). Promotion notes the percentage of the workforce who moved up one or more levels this year. Horizontal movement is the percentage of employees who took a different job at the same or lower level, demonstrating an internal learning opportunity. The “internal movement metric” column is the combined number, noting all employees who have made a career move year-to-date.

Opportunity parity metrics – FY2020 through Q3 (December 2019 – August 2020)

* Internal movement includes promotions and horizontal movement. Employees who experienced both types of movement during FY20 year-to-date were only counted once

Because this is the first year we’ve analyzed horizontal movement, we can’t say for sure whether this volume of moves is typical in a normal year – and how the advent of COVID-19 might have affected our internal talent dynamics. However, we feel it provides an important baseline for future analysis.

Our pay and opportunity parity are indicators of something deeper and more important: Ensuring that every employee feels equally appreciated and respected and has an opportunity to pursue career growth throughout their time at Adobe. We still have work to do, but we’re happy to have taken another step forward.