Our DE+I Commitments: One Year Later

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In June 2020, Padilla outlined our commitments to do our part to help break the cycle of discrimination, racial injustice and inequity in our society – more specifically in the communications industry. This is in keeping with two of our Shared Beliefs – “Think as Many” and “Work Brave.”  

Our commitments included:

Part of that commitment also included establishing a baseline for improvement. A year ago, Padilla shared our staffing demographics, along with many others in the communications industry, as part of #CommitToChange, started by 600 & Rising. We acknowledged then that we had work to do recruiting and retaining Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) team members and were committed to doing things differently.

Over the past year, we’ve made strides in living our Shared Beliefs and advancing our DE+I commitments:

Three initiatives that we’re most proud of are programs that we created or co-created related to DE+I:

Where do we stand since making our commitments a year ago?

We’ve made progress, but the reality is, we still have work to do – especially related to recruitment and retention. When we reported our employee demographics in July 2020, our BIPOC employee population was just shy of 10%. Today, we are at about 11%. We remain strong in our representation of women – with women outpacing men at every level of our organization, including at the leadership level (VP and above).

We will continue to expand our efforts to recruit diverse talent – at all levels within our organization. But recruitment isn’t enough. We also will continue our effort to retain great talent.  

Change doesn’t always come as quickly as we want, but we are not deterred. The old adage remains true: this is a marathon and not a sprint.

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