Adobe For All Week 2021: Do One Thing Today

John Warnock and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe on a set of key fundamental principles: our people are our most important asset, good ideas come from everywhere, giving back to our community is a part of who we are, and build a company where you’d want to work yourself. Nearly 40 years later, Adobe continues to invest in creating a diverse and inclusive environment for our employees, customers, partners, and the tech industry as a whole.

This week kicks off Adobe For All Week, an important time each year where we come together as a company around our shared values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This year’s program is centered around the theme Do One Thing Today - our belief that small actions can create a big impact, and everyone can make a difference. Here’s what we’ll be sharing this week:

Advancing Representation

In order for creativity to be for all, it must be from all. To help improve employee representation, in September 2020, we established aspirational goals for overall representation, and representation at leadership levels. We continue to work towards increasing representation of women in leadership positions to 30% globally by 2025, and double representation of US underrepresented minorities in leadership positions by 2025. We maintain our focus on diversity on our Adobe Board Directors because we believe that diversity in both professional and personal experiences, expertise, culture, race, ethnicity and gender is important to our success.

Building Community

Adobe’s employee networks play an instrumental role in connecting employees with similar backgrounds and identities to help support underrepresented communities. We are forming a global Indigenous Peoples employee network, to join our current community of seven employee networks.

Pay & Career Growth

We want every Adobe employee to feel they have fair compensation and opportunity. In 2018, we announced we achieved global gender pay parity - ensuring employees in the same job and location are paid fairly, relative to one another, regardless of their gender or ethnicity - which we have reaffirmed each year since.

Today, we’re pleased to once again affirm that we have maintained global gender pay parity and pay parity between employees from underrepresented minority (URM) groups - Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or employees of two or more races – as well as for non-URM employees.

In 2019, we began looking at internal promotions and horizontal movement across demographic groups, pioneering an important baseline tracking for what we call “opportunity parity.” We continue to focus on strengthening our career growth and mobility foundation for everyone at Adobe and provide transparency, learn and iterate as we move forward.

Investing in the Next Generation

In order to create products that solve challenging problems for people all over the world, companies need to hire employees who can bring diverse perspectives and life experiences. We’re committed to growing the talent pipeline by providing career opportunities to underrepresented and underserved students.

Today, we’re launching a new initiative which will give us the opportunity to partner with universities to develop unique solutions that expose students to careers in tech and prepare them with the creativity and digital skills they’ll need for the future. As part of this, we’re excited to announce partnerships with Bowie State University, Winston-Salem State University and San José State University, the inaugural members of the program, with a $1 million donation to each school.

We will strategically invest in providing students training, career readiness, internships, financial assistance, and digital tools to fuel their professional careers - at Adobe or elsewhere. The program offers a variety of resources and opportunities to help students and faculty prepare for careers in tech, including evolving curriculum, and hands-on work experience through programs like Experience Days and the Adobe Career Academy; as well as micro-internships for student athletes so they’re able to balance their athletic and professional aspirations. Adobe will also provide 100 annual scholarships of up to $15,000 USD each to students.

Every school is different, so we’re focusing on partnering with each institution to identify where we can drive the most impact together. Our goal is to continue to iterate and evolve so that we can scale our approach to add more schools in the future.

Elevating Diverse Voices

As part of Adobe’s ongoing commitment to support and amplify diverse voices, we are tapping into our platforms and our global community to provide the space, support, and resources for creators to share their stories with the world. We launched Create Change, a conversational show that brings together creators across disciplines to share their creativity, including special episodes to mark Pride month. In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, Create Change will highlight the Hispanic community with new episodes featuring Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Stephanie Beatriz, Alaina Castillo, Jillian Mercado and Jesus Morales. We also released ‘When I See Black’, a film dedicated to the spectrum of the Black experience told through the eyes and voices of 12 Black creators, and ‘Where I’m From’, a film featuring eight Asian Pacific Islander artists showcasing the immense diversity in the experiences, backgrounds and influences that shape API creative expression.

#AdobeForAll

Our employees play a vital role in advancing the vision of Adobe For All inside our company and beyond. We believe that everyone has a story to tell, and when people share their life experiences in genuine and vulnerable ways, our perspectives expand, empathy builds, and we strengthen overall inclusion.

Employees will share their lived experience with all of us, and we’re excited to share them with you as well with the launch of our “My Story” campaign. From across the organization, we are made up of engineers, marketers, sales professionals, and more. But we are also allies, veterans, and social justice warriors. “My Story” gives a glimpse into the powerful stories that make up our people and company culture.

In the spirit of taking action, we’re also making our Adobe For All Action Assessment available to the public. Introduced to our employees last year, the assessment takes you through a series of self-reflective questions and delivers tailored guidance on how individuals can take effective and actionable steps to create greater inclusion in the workplace.

As Adobe employees around the world commit to ‘Do One Thing Today’, we hope you’ll join us in taking action to create a world rich with inclusion, empathy, and connection together.