A year ago, when
PayPal became an independent company once again, we defined our clear mission to reimagine money and democratize financial services so that managing and moving money is a right for all citizens, not just the affluent. To achieve this mission we also set out to create a culture at PayPal that is built around our four values of Collaboration, Innovation, Inclusion, and Wellness.
As part of our commitment to being inclusive, we are building a work environment that reflects the world we live in and celebrates the incredible variety of experiences, capabilities, talents, backgrounds, and interests of our employees who shape our culture, build our products and services, and work every day to make moving and managing money easier, safer, and more convenient for millions of customers around the globe.
Today, as part of our journey to create the kind of workplace we envision, we are sharing information about the demographic makeup of our 18,000 employees for the first time. These are numbers we will share annually because we know that transparency is essential to fostering constructive dialogue, action, and progress.
The initial data on inclusion and diversity at PayPal is encouraging. In our first year, we achieved strong gender balance, with 44 percent women and 56 percent men across our global workforce. Just as important, there is no disparity at PayPal in salaries between women and men. One of our most important priorities was to ensure that people working in comparable roles are paid equally throughout the company regardless of gender. We focused and worked hard, and successfully reached this goal in less than a year. We are also working hard to increase the number of women in management roles at PayPal. Women make up one-third of the company's leadership today, and during the past year our rate of female promotions and new hires in leadership roles is outpacing our historical average. We are also retaining a proportionately higher number of females in leadership roles.
Globally, we have a diverse workforce with employees representing 119 nationalities in 56 offices across 31 countries. And in the U.S., we are making progress increasing the number of African Americans and Hispanics who work at PayPal. Together, they make up 14 percent of our U.S. workforce. While that is better than most tech companies, it is still short of our goal of a workforce that truly reflects the makeup of the communities in which we work and live. We have full ethnic pay parity in the U.S., which reflects our belief in treating everyone fairly and equally regardless of ethnicity.
Our focus on LGBT equality and inclusion is also strong. We are deeply honored to have received a score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, and we continue to enjoy success in attracting top LGBT talent. We have made investments in offering benefits that are equal for everyone, including same-sex couples and transgender employees.
To build on this foundation in the year ahead, I have asked senior leaders from across the company to make diversity commitments backed up by clear organizational management plans. We will strengthen our relationships with organizations that are increasing diversity in the technology industry, such as the
Anita Borg Institute, the
Clayman Institute,
Dev Bootcamp, Prince’s Trust, and Stonewall. We’ll also expand the innovative programs we’ve introduced at PayPal this year such as Recharge, which helps qualified professionals who have taken time away from the technology industry gain the skills they need to reenter the workforce.
In addition, we’ll seek to nurture diverse leadership talent within the company through initiatives such as expanding our mentorship program for women, and by investing in our Inclusion & Diversity communities. New employee benefits that we’ve introduced, such as enhanced family leave, will help us continue to recruit and retain great talent by recognizing the needs of a truly diverse workforce. Given our company’s purpose-driven mission and culture, we’ll also continue building the natural connections between the important work of our employee communities and our external social innovation and community efforts around the world.
Underlying all our commitment is the deeper goal of equal opportunity and treatment for all. We pursue this goal inside the company because we believe that an environment where all employees feel valued and empowered to offer their best ideas will make us a stronger, more successful company.
More than that, we pursue this goal because this is the kind of world we wish to live in—a world in which everyone has an equal opportunity to lead a fulfilling, safe, and successful life. This is why we are working to deliver financial services that can bring greater financial health to underserved people around the world. It’s why we use our role as a leader in technology and financial services to advocate for greater equality, something we did earlier this year through our decision not to move forward with plans to expand into Charlotte, NC. And it’s why we look forward to increasing inclusion and diversity at PayPal in the coming year and beyond.
Our firm belief is that through our actions, we can make a difference—for employees, customers, and communities. Together, we can help make PayPal and the communities we live in equal and fair for all.