Our Path to Equality: The Salesforce Annual Update

At Salesforce, we believe that business can be a powerful platform for social change and that it is our responsibility to help drive Equality for All. We strive to build a workplace that reflects society — where everyone feels seen, heard, valued and empowered to succeed. 

We recognize that as a company and as an industry, we have more work to do and we all have a role to play. Data is foundational to the journey. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, every year we publish our Equality data on our website along with the strategies we believe will help move us forward.

Our Equality data

From this year’s Equality data, we see more progress in some areas and less progress in others. 

View the full report to see intersectional gender and race (U.S. Only)
representation data by leadership, tech, and non-tech.

Our observations

Since 2014, 9,300+ more women globally and 1,770+ more underrepresented minorities (Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Multiracial) in the U.S. work at Salesforce. However, we recognize these are certainly not points to celebrate as we still have a significant amount of work ahead building a company that reflects society.

We’ve seen progress in these areas:

• Populations of underrepresented minorities and women have increased and outpaced Salesforce’s rapid growth.
• Women represent 33.0% of our global workforce — up 1.4% from last year.
• More than 37% of new hires were women, up 2% from last year.
• Fifty percent of new college graduate hires in the U.S. were women or from underrepresented minorities, up 3% from last year.
• Half of our employees are in one or more Employee Resource Groups.

Our top opportunity areas:

• Accelerating the pace of growth of our underrepresented minority population (Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Multiracial). Underrepresented minorities represent 10.5% — up 0.3% from last year.
• Improving representation in leadership for women and people of color (This refers to anyone who does not identify as White, including Black, Latinx, Asian/Indian, Indigenous, and Multiracial employees.)
• Increasing women and underrepresented minorities (Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Multiracial) in tech roles.
• Gaining more complete voluntary Self-ID representation data for veterans, LGBTQ+ and people with disabilities.

Additional U.S. representation data

For the first time, we are also publicly sharing our broader U.S. representation data collected through our voluntary Self-ID efforts. This includes LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and veterans. Currently, our voluntary Self-ID adoption in the U.S. is slower than we’d like. We recognize that we have significant work ahead to drive completions and ensure we have comprehensive data that reflects the actual populations of these communities.

Building a workplace that reflects society

We are deeply committed to building a workplace that reflects society. As part of this, we are announcing a new goal, and strategies to drive progress within our company.

Our goal: We aspire to have 50% of our U.S. workforce made up of underrepresented groups by 2023, as well as continue to build a workforce globally that reflects our communities.

Our current state: Today, in the U.S., 43.9% of our workforce is comprised of underrepresented groups (Women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Multiracial, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and veterans).

Our path forward

We are taking a comprehensive and data-driven approach as we work to integrate Equality into every step of our employee experience. In that spirit, we are working across the company to build strategies to move us forward on this path. These strategies include:

Leading with data

Every month, senior leaders receive a scorecard detailing the headcount, hiring, attrition and promotion data by gender (global) and race (U.S). Our largest organizations are guided by an Equality board made up of their recruiting, employee success, Equality partners, and senior leaders to drive prescriptive actions based on data.

Investing in development

We are investing in empowering our future diverse leaders with two new initiatives— our Equality Mentorship program and a partnership with the Executive Leadership Council on an in-house development program focused on underrepresented minorities.

Empowering our Equality Groups

Our Equality Groups are employee-led organizations that support our underrepresented communities. The leaders are on the front lines of Equality, driving progress together as volunteers. Our employees receive 56 hours a year to volunteer — time spent leading this important work counts toward their hours.

Everyone has a role to play on the path to Equality — we encourage everyone to participate as allies, to build empathy, learn, and stand together with their colleagues.

Adopting inclusive practices

To ensure that everyone has access to opportunities at Salesforce, and feels reflected in our company — we are committed to fair, equitable, and inclusive business processes. This includes our commitment to Equal Pay for Equal Work ($10.3M invested so far), our new Office of Accessibility; and empowering our employees with inclusive business practices (i.e. inclusive hiring, inclusive marketing, and more.)

Honoring our employees leading change

We’d like to express our deepest gratitude to all of our employees working to drive Equality in our company.

We believe we have the power to build a better company and more equal world. We can do this by widening access to the incredible opportunities our industry provides and empowering everyone to perform the best work of their careers. We have more work to do but we are deeply committed to this journey, together.

Learn more about our commitment to Equality and how you can join us on our path.