Adobe’s FY2020 Diversity & Inclusion Year in Review

Today we published our Adobe Diversity & Inclusion Year in Review Report for the fiscal year 2020. There’s no denying it—2020 was a tough year for our employees and our society at large. Adobe For All — our vision of making everyone feel included, respected, and valued — was tested and fueled in ways that we could not have imagined. While we were faced with enormous challenges with the pandemic and racial injustices globally, we also experienced meaningful growth and gained important lessons that we’ll take forward.

Below are a few key insights from the report:

Employee Demographic Metrics

Relative to the diverse makeup of our workforce, we experienced slower progress in 2020 than we did in 2019. Our diversity representation metrics remained relatively flat, which we attribute to a slower pace of hiring and low attrition during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Gender Representation. Globally, women represented 33.5% of our employees, 26.1% of our leadership roles*, and 37.7% of our new hires at the end of FY2020.

With this Year in Review report, we have also shared the gender mix by region:

• Americas: 36.9% Women
• Asia Pacific and Japan: 37.2% Women
• Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: 29.6% Women
• India: 27.7% Women

This data helps illustrate the varied dynamics we are addressing as a global company, with only about half of our total employee base in the United States.

US underrepresented minorities representation. At the end of FY2020, US underrepresented minority (URM) employees (i.e., those who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or two or more races) comprised 10.8% of our U.S. employee base, an increase of 0.6% from FY2019. From the end of FY2016 to FY2020, URM representation increased by 2.3%.

Additional data points we have shared in this report include:

• 6.6% of US URM employees were in leadership* roles
• 53.1% of US URM employees were in technical** roles, and US URM employees comprised 8.9% of Adobe’s US technical workforce
• 17.6% of US new hires were a member of an URM race/ethnicity

Adobe’s investment in recruitment events for underrepresented communities and engagement with university partners and student associations contributed to the positive shifts for representation with new hires and in technical roles. And we are increasing our focus and investment to grow a pipeline of more diverse talent into senior levels of leadership.

Aspirational goals. To help improve employee representation, in September 2020 we articulated aspirational goals for overall representation and representation at leadership levels. We’re committed to continuing to increase global diversity and inclusion to reflect the world around us. Because we believe that leadership role models can create a virtuous cycle of growth, development, and advancement, we want to increase representation of women in leadership positions to 30% globally by 2025, and double representation of US URM in leadership positions by 2025. In alignment with our FY2020 launch of the Taking Action Initiative to accelerate the representation, development, and success of Adobe’s Black employees, we also want to double Black representation as a percentage of US employees by 2025.

Enhancing the employee experience

As our employees struggled with feelings of isolation, fear, and grief during the challenging year, we found new ways to support and empower them while continuing our efforts to make Adobe a more inclusive place to work.

Fighting for racial justice and economic equality. The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 shocked us all and was a galvanizing moment for advancing racial justice and economic equality. In response, we developed the Taking Action Initiative (TAI), to accelerate the representation, development, and success of Adobe’s Black employees while working to change the broader landscape of social injustice and economic inequality. Led by members of the Black Employee Network and subject matter owners from across the company, TAI’s five task forces cover community, hiring and recruiting, growth and advancement, responsibility and advocacy, and transparency and governance. This structure has been invaluable in helping us move faster on key initiatives from our investments in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to growth and development programs, and many others.

Caring for employees during the COVID-19 outbreak. In March 2020, the global pandemic led us to close our offices and make a quick pivot to remote work. We quickly transitioned our in-person workflows to the virtual world and introduced new programs and benefits to sustain employee safety and wellbeing. To maintain connections and camaraderie among our employees, we hosted virtual Adobe For All Coffee Break sessions, where leaders and guest speakers shared their personal experiences. We brought together D&I champions from around the world during our Adobe For All Week event. And we strengthened empathy through the power of employee storytelling throughout the year.

Employee network growth. As we shifted to a virtual environment in 2020, our seven employee resource groups (ERGs) – which we call employee networks – played an instrumental role connecting our employees globally. Where they had previously hosted in-person, site-based events to celebrate cultural moments, they realized they could now engage employees in every location to join virtual gatherings and strengthen our global community and increase employee network membership.

• At the end of FY2020, 31% of employees were members of one or more employee networks, up from 22% in FY2019.
• This represented a 46% increase in the total number of members year-over-year.

Employee parity progress

As part of our commitment to Adobe For All, we want every employee to feel they have fair compensation and opportunity. We’ve continued to invest in analysis and transparency to demonstrate that commitment.

Pay Parity. One of the most important ways to show our employees we value them is by paying them fairly. In September FY2020 we reaffirmed global gender pay parity, marking three consecutive years that we have attained gender pay parity. And in September 2020 we announced we are at pay parity among URM employees and non-URM employees in the US. We had previously disclosed that non-white employees were paid as much as white employees.

Opportunity Parity. In February 2019 we introduced an initiative we call opportunity parity, examining fairness in internal promotions and horizontal movement across demographic groups. We began sharing global gender and US race/ethnicity rates that same year and we updated the metrics in FY2020.

• Our fiscal 2020 promotion rate was 18.6% for women and 17.5% for men.
• Our fiscal 2019 US promotion rate was 16.1% for US URM employees and 16.3% for non-URM employees.

In FY2020, we continued our data and transparency journey and shared for the first time global gender horizontal movement metrics and internal movement metrics. Additionally, we shared opportunity parity metrics across major geographic regions and for major job segments.

Participating in organizations dedicated to driving change

To benchmark our commitment to foster an inclusive and supportive environment, we continued to participate in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index and Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index. And in FY2020, Adobe was included in Disability:IN’s Disability Equality Index for the first time.

Given all that we accomplished to strengthen inclusion at Adobe over the last year, we are pleased to be recognized today by Forbes as one of America’s Best Employers for Diversity 2021.

We are proud of the way our employees demonstrated their resilience this year and invested in building an inclusive community, while we also worked toward broader change (see our FY2020 Corporate Social Responsibility report, also released today). As we move forward, we’re reflecting on lessons learned in FY2020 and we’re using those lessons to strengthen Adobe’s culture and achieve our Adobe For All vision.

*Leadership is defined as employees who are director-level and above with at least one full-time employee direct report.

**Technical occupations in computing and information technology that require deep technical specialization and knowledge, as well as managers, directors, and executives who oversee technical employees and the development and delivery of technical products. Reference: AnitaB.org