Amazon announced its 2021 goals for diversity, equity and inclusion with an emphasis on increasing representation of Black employees in the U.S. as well as focusing on professional development, retention and talent assessment.
In a blog post, Amazon’s senior vice president of people eXperience and technology Beth Galetti explained that the company’s 2021 goals will build on progress made in 2020, adding that Amazon is “continuing goals to increase representation of Black employees in the U.S., as this is where we have the furthest to go.”
Related: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Technology Industry Progress Report
Amazon Announces 2021 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Goals
Galetti said nearly all of the new goals for 2021 aim to address situations in which employees from a diverse set of backgrounds have different experiences than their peers in areas like development, retention and talent assessment.
Here are the company-wide goals for 2021:
- Inspect any statistically significant demographic differences in Q1 2021 performance ratings by VP team to identify root causes and, as necessary, implement action plans.
- Inspect any statistically significant demographic differences in attrition and low performance actions by VP team on a monthly basis to identify root causes and, as necessary, implement action plans.
- Retain employees at statistically similar rates across all demographics.
- Build a scalable mechanism in Connections to inspect inclusion sentiment by demographic for all employees.
- Ensure that 100% of Amazonians take company-wide required inclusion training.
- Build scalable mechanisms that address new instances of non-inclusive terms in our code and document repositories or development tools.
- For the second year in a row, double the number of U.S. Black employees at L8-L10 (Directors and VPs) year-over-year from 2020 numbers.
- Increase hiring of U.S. Black employees at L4-L7 by at least 30% year-over-year from 2020 hiring.
- Increase the number of women at L8-L10 (Senior Principals, Directors, VPs, and Distinguished Engineers) in tech and science roles by 30% year-over-year.
- Increase the number of U.S. Black software development engineer interns by at least 40%.
- Reach 1.6 million underrepresented students globally through Amazon Future Engineer with real world-inspired virtual and hands-on computer science project learning.
Amazon's 2021 DEI Goals: Ongoing Work
Galetti noted that the goals only represent “a slice of Amazon’s ongoing DEI work,” and that other business units and geographies have their own individual goals. “Owners from across the company are focused on DEI in the way we select vendors and financial partners, to the way we use the website to support our Sellers, to the way we roll out products and media to the world, we are working to shape a more equitable and inclusive future,” Galetti said in the post.
She also said Amazon plans to increase the amount and specificity of data the company shares publicly to help evaluate progress over time. The expanded dataset includes representation by job type, such as front-line associates and corporate employees, and expands our historical data to the past three years, according to the post.
