PayPal is committed to making a positive difference in the world. Our ability to deliver on our mission of democratizing financial services and capabilities starts from the inside; by building a global team of employees that reflects the communities where we work and live, and the diversity of the customers we serve. That’s why Inclusion is a core value and defines who we are and everything we do. For PayPal, bringing this value to life means building an ever more inclusive company culture, built on respect for individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, and the self-expression of our colleagues.
There are clearly many aspects to what makes a company successful, but I strongly believe that our greatest asset and driver of performance is our people. It is our employees who show up each day to innovate, collaborate and draw upon each other’s strengths. We recognize and embrace that it is individual qualities that make each one of us unique and allow teamwork to flourish.
PayPal is a blended community of 18,000 employees around the world. We have made encouraging progress in some very important areas of inclusion and diversity, including pay equity. But, as in everything we do, we must strive to continually improve and do better.
Gender equality – We continue to work toward gender equality in our workforce at all levels. We have maintained a strong gender balance of our total workforce at 43 percent female. And we’re leading from the top with a 20 percent year-over-year increase in women at the vice president and above level. Among women at this level we also had a 13 percent jump in promotions year-over-year and a significant drop in voluntary attrition. And while we increased our external hiring of women at the VP and above level by 150 percent over last year, we promoted twice as many women at this level than we’ve hired externally. I am proud that we strengthened our overall gender balance in leadership positions with a three percent year-over-year increase in the number of women in leadership roles.
We also delivered on an important commitment to build a more diverse board of directors. We’ve added two outstanding women directors and just recently announced a new director who is African American. This means 45 percent of our board is now comprised of women and underrepresented ethnic groups. This is an important step that sets the pace for our entire organization, and I’m proud that PayPal is being honored next month by the Women’s Forum of New York for accelerating gender parity in the boardroom. We are, however, still working to improve the gender balance in technical roles. Twenty-five percent of our technical workforce is now comprised of women, which is only a slight increase from last year.
Gender pay equity – Ensuring that comparable employees in similar roles are paid equitably continues to be foundational to our diversity and inclusion efforts. I was especially pleased to share last year that we achieved pay equity in salaries globally for women and men. As a company, we continue to rigorously monitor how we’re doing and I’m pleased to report that we’ve maintained pay equity globally in salaries between women and men.
Ethnic diversity and pay equity – We have a diverse global workforce, with employees representing 122 nationalities in 55 offices across 31 countries. In the United States, the number of underrepresented ethnic groups in technical roles increased by three percent to nine percent, while 17 percent of our overall U.S. workforce is made up of underrepresented ethnic groups. We also continued to maintain ethnic pay equity in salaries in the U.S. This continues to trend in the right direction, but we know we have more to do and we are committed to the work ahead.
Building the inclusive and culturally diverse workforce we envision requires consistent dedication, short- and long-term investment, and strategic focus. For example, we participate in the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion initiative, which is the largest CEO-driven business commitment to rally the business community together to take measurable action in advancing diversity and inclusion in the workplace. As part of our commitment at PayPal, we have put in place a number of initiatives, partnerships and programs, some of which are beginning to show results, while others will take more time to have the impact we desire.
We continue to expand innovative company wide programs, such as Recharge, which helps women professionals who have taken time away from the technology industry gain the skills they need to reenter the workforce. With the knowledge that each employee at PayPal plays a role in advancing diversity, we also offer all employees the opportunity to participate in a training focused on helping them become more aware of their unconscious biases, and creating personal action plans to address them.
We are also taking proactive steps to build and expand a diverse pipeline of talent to attract a broad spectrum of employees of all different backgrounds and experiences. In key areas of our business we are developing talent sourcing teams that focus on diversity and mandating diverse interview slates prior to making hiring decisions. We support these actions by leveraging our employee network and partner organizations, like the
Anita BorgInstitute and the
Clayman Institute, to help us maximize our efforts and make strategic investments that will yield long-term results.
The thriving diversity and inclusion community groups within PayPal play an important role inactively supporting and advocating for employees who are women, veterans, LGBTQ, specially-abled or disadvantaged, and we’ve recently launched Amplify, our new community to help advance the experience of black employees of PayPal around the world. Our community groups are united by the common purpose of fostering a sense of belonging and support for inclusion to thrive in the workplace, and they are empowered to help us build values-driven programs that improve our ability to attract, retain, develop and engage a diverse workforce. We recently held a global employee meeting to discuss issues that directly impact the experiences of our people.
PayPal is fully committed to achieving a more diverse and inclusive workplace. Our commitment is inherent to who we are, and what we stand for as a company. We pursue diversity and inclusion because we believe that our employees deserve an environment where they are valued for who they are – a place where everyone can express their full selves and fulfill their highest potential. It strengthens our ability to innovate and to understand and better serve our customers. It furthers our ability to achieve and live our mission, vision and values, deliver quantifiable results, and make a real difference in the world.
We updated this blog post on April 27, 2018, to include our annual EEO-1 report for 2017, as well as our historical EEO-1 report from 2015 and 2016. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) requires employers to submit an EEO-1 report on an annual basis. The report breaks down an employer’s workforce by race, ethnicity and sex across job categories established by the EEOC. While we have decided to make this data publicly available, we believe the information we disclosed in our annual Diversity and Inclusion report is a more accurate representation of the progress we’re making toward diversity.