Etsy’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.
At our core, we believe that diversity of backgrounds, thoughts, and experience brings out the best in all of us. In October 2017, we announced a diversity impact goal to “meaningfully increase representation of underrepresented groups and ensure equity in Etsy’s workforce.” To advance our goal, we are focused on recruiting, retention, training, and building an inclusive culture.
Creating hiring practices that help ensure equity and mitigate potential bias. We have put specific processes in place to help ensure that job applicants are all evaluated for the same skills keyed to a particular role. For example, in 2018, we implemented hiring rubrics to guide interviewers to ask the questions that directly relate to job skills, and to predetermine what excellent answers should sound like. Research demonstrates that when interviewers preselect the kinds of answers they want to hear, they are less likely to favor candidates who share their personality and/or background, and more likely to evaluate candidates according to the stated job criteria. We created these hiring guidelines to ensure that all candidates are evaluated fairly and with objective criteria, and we provided training on this to our hiring managers.
Continuing to mitigate potential bias in evaluation, promotion, and compensation. We know that creating and maintaining a diverse workforce is not just about hiring — retention and fairness in all employee processes are critical to ensuring that employees from all backgrounds want to stay and grow here. We have implemented a more formal companywide performance management process to support consistent and fair evaluations. We also periodically review employee compensation to help ensure it is fair and free from potential bias.
Providing diversity and inclusion training that hits the mark. We have established a regular cadence of diversity and inclusion training to help ensure that Etsy is the kind of place where candidates from all backgrounds can feel at home. We also have provided managers with in-person, highly interactive anti-discrimination and anti-harassment training because we know that handling these issues well is one of the core tenets of a quality workforce diversity program.
Communicating the inclusive culture at Etsy. We are proud of the diversity in our leadership. More than 50% of our Executive Team is women and half of our Board of Directors is also women.
We promote and resource our employee resource groups (“ERGs”), highlight key event months (e.g., Black History Month, Pride Month) and new partnerships, broadcast upcoming diversity-related happenings, select special Etsy shops in accordance with diversity-related events, and give our ERG leaders time and space in front of the entire Etsy community to share their group’s mission and focus. Our ERGs include our Asian Resource Community, Black Resource and Identity Group at Etsy, Jewish People at Etsy, Hispanic Latinx Network, Parents ERG, Queer@Etsy, and Women and NonBinary People in Tech. We also remain open to the creation of new ERGs if employees want additional groups.
This is an excerpt from our Impact Update, a report that outlines how Etsy creates value for our company, our employees, our sellers, our buyers, and our shareholders.
