Snap Releases Diversity Annual Report for 2022

Snap Inc. released its Diversity Annual Report for 2022 Wednesday, admitting that it is not quite meeting its goals and detailing the steps it is taking to remedy that. CEO Evan Spiegel and vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion Oona King wrote in the report’s introduction, “So, how are we doing? When it comes to our workforce representation goals, we’re still falling short. This report is not an attempt to put a glossy sheen on our numbers. It is an honest acknowledgement of where we are, where we’re trying to go and how we plan to get there. We also know that the issues we are addressing aren’t unique to Snap, but rather have become endemic to the tech industry. With that recognition, in January 2020, we began convening a coalition of leading DEI experts from academia and business to create a new blueprint for tech companies to take bold, collective action. In 2021, this coalition released the Action to Catalyze Tech report. Over 30 CEOs and executives from leading tech companies signed on.” They continued, “Our long-term DEI strategy—built around empathy, systems design and accountability—draws on many elements of the ACT report. We know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we also can’t wait years to deliver results. That’s why we marry urgency and ambition with realism about where we are. We also know it is likely to get harder before it gets easier. Although our results don’t always reflect our enormous efforts, we’re not giving up—instead, we’re doubling down to make Snap more inclusive and accountable. In addition to our efforts at Snap, we want to contribute positively to the technology industry as a whole.” Snap shared some highlights from the report: Women in tech roles reached 19.6%, with an overall goal of 25% by 2025.The percentage of women on the global workforce rose by 2.1 percentage points, to 34.9%.Asian team members in leadership in the U.S. saw a 20% year-over-year gain, to 17.1% from 14.3%, with a goal of 17.9% by 2025.Underrepresented racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. saw a 1.3 percentage point uptick, to 17.4%, with a 2025 goal of 20%. Black representation rose to 5.3% from 4.9%, Hispanic/Latinx to 7.6% from 6.8% and multiracial to 4.2% from 4.1%.Representation for Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders and Native American/Alaskan Natives was unchanged, at 0.1% and 0.2%, respectively.The attrition rate for women rose year-over-year, driven by an increase in attrition of women in non-technical roles.Attrition rates for Hispanic/Latinx team members rose slightly from last year, to 1.17 from 1.09 I1 represents average attrition), while the rate decreased to 1.52 from 1.87 for Black team members. Snap also detailed several initiatives that are already in place or being implemented. The company aims to continue to inspire empathy through storytelling, relying on augmented reality, offering as an example an AR experience in London's Trafalgar Square in partnership with the Black Cultural Archives to educate Snapchatters about untold Black History in the U.K. Snap revealed an Equity Partnership Pledge for Snap Originals at its NewFronts presentation earlier this month, setting goals that by 2025, 50% of all above-the-line talent, below-the-line crew, hosts, leads, production company owners/leaders and showrunners are from historically underrepresented backgrounds. The company enhanced its process of testing the inclusivity of features by boosting the diversity of testers and points at which it tests, specifically testing new features, products and updates with Snapchatters from underrepresented communities. Snap will provide $10 million of the $20 million being invested by the Catalyze Tech coalition in four teaching colleges to help increase the number of computer science teachers across the country. The Snap Academy program was expanded to include the Snap Lens Academy in partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an eight-week educational program with a custom curriculum that teaches the fundamentals of creating AR experiences through Lens Studio. Snap teamed up with Next Shift Learning on the AR Lens Challenge program, enabling high-school and community college students to create and design their own lenses on Lens Studio via a mix of self-guided modules and live workshops by AR experts. The company also teamed up with SignAll on a lens to teach Snapchatters American Sign Language, designed by its Deafengers employee group of deaf and hard-of-hearing team members. Snap is partnering with the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative on a diversity audit of the content on its Discover platform, using a combination of humans and machine learning to develop an understanding of the quantity and quality of on-screen representation of different identity groups. The company set a goal last year of doubling its spend with underrepresented suppliers by 2023, and it already surpassed that goal, so it again committed to double its spend with diverse suppliers to $30 million by 2025. Snap allocates at least 15% of its U.S. digital media brand budget to BIPOC-owned (Black, indigenous and people of color) publishers or media creators, and in 2021, nearly 75% of its marketing productions were directed by underrepresented talent. The company began offering free memberships to Asian, Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous and women-founded benefits providers through resources such as Carrot Fertility, Fairfax Training Club and Northstar Money. Snap upped the available number of hours of backup child care through Helpr from 80 to 120, added an educational care concierge service to help parents find childcare and local school options and expanded its number of free sessions per family member with mental health provider Lyra from 16 to 25, integrating the latter into its medical plan as an in-network provider. Finally, the company’s North American ad sales organization developed a Snap Agile team to cover the book of business for team members on approved leave. Snap concluded, “At Snap, we’re committed to building diversity, equity and inclusion into everything we do—from who we hire and how we support our team, to the products and technology we build, to the content we distribute, to the partners we work with. Over the past couple of years, we’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t. We’ve set public DEI goals to scale empathy and drive accountability across our business. While we’ve made important progress, we know we must do so much more to build a diverse team that fully represents the communities we serve. Our top priority is creating a culture where everyone feels they belong and has an equal opportunity to thrive. There is no doubt that today our workforce representation numbers fall short. But we won’t stop until we live up to our promise and ambition around DEI. We know in our hearts that building a more inclusive company isn’t just the right thing to do—in the long term, it is the only way for our business to succeed.”