Earlier this year, I shared progress on our 2021 work. And over the past several months, I’ve worked to get a better understanding of what diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) means to Amazonians and what work would be most impactful to our teams. Like many of you, I’ve also spent time reflecting on the many things going on in the world and the tenacity it will take from all of us to make Amazon more inclusive than our world outside.
We’re making good strides in DEI, but we have much more to do. Today, I’d like to update you on our vision for DEI at Amazon, our 2022 priorities, and progress made against some of those priorities at the halfway point in the year.
Our vision for DEI is to create inclusive experiences everywhere.We’re committing to DEI being part of everything we do and believe that if we get this right, together, we can create a greater sense of inclusion not only at work, but for our customers and the communities we serve around the world. It’s also critical that we foster a culture where inclusive experiences are an Amazon norm, from the way we hire and develop employees, select vendors, support our sellers to how we launch and market our products.
As we take our next steps in the Amazon DEI journey, we are making progress on several priorities for 2022. These priorities include S-team goals, but also extend beyond them, as this work will be carried out at many levels, businesses, and teams across the company. Below are some of our key priorities for this year.
Global
- Develop DEI programs to help you become a better ally, enhance the experiences of employees and customers, and provide hiring and upskilling opportunities for women, Indigenous, transgender and LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, and military populations.
- Expand representation across our employee population and engagement with diverse student groups including:
- Increase the number of women in L8+ positions in STEM-focused roles by at least 35%.
- Increase global engagement with students from underrepresented communities by expanding Amazon Future Engineer’s computer-science learning programming.
- Conduct deep dives by region to inform the DEI OP1 and establish priorities in 2023.
U.S.
- Ensure more diverse representation within our employee population:
- Increase hiring of veterans by at least 23% and military spouses by at least 15%.
- Increase both L8+ Black and Latino leaders across the U.S. by at least 35%.
- Increase both L4-L7 Black and Latino talent across the U.S. by at least 30%.
- As part of our commitment to create a safer, more productive, higher-performing, more diverse, and more just work environment, we will conduct a racial equity audit to evaluate the impacts of our policies, programs, and practices on hourly Operations employees in the U.S.
In the first half of 2022, we launched Inclusive Communities, a new program focused on delivering DEI global initiatives for the Indigenous, transgender and LGBTQIA+, people with disabilities, and military workforce. We also kicked off work on our racial equity audit, establishing a two-pizza team across several organizations that meets weekly. We continue to make progress toward our hiring and diverse representation goals, and have expand our focus into the Latino community. Lastly, to make it easier for Amazonians to learn about our work in DEI, we’ve launched an Inclusive Experiences team dedicated to improving DEI communications, creating initiatives you can engage with as an individual or team, and offering resources to help us all build global DEI competencies and work better together—with all of our differences. We’ve also refreshed our global DEI website and established DEI tenets, in partnership with DEI leaders across each business.
Over the past month we’ve made several key hires to our Global DEI team, and I’m excited to see how these new Amazonians will further accelerate this early progress on our goals. Looking ahead, we will expand our priorities by region so that employees around the world can see themselves in our shared DEI work. We will continue to provide regular updates on our workforce progress and offer inclusive experiences for you to get involved with wherever you are in the world.
We believe that by creating inclusive experiences everywhere, we can make Amazon more inclusive than the world outside. This will require all of us to do our part, and our hope is that you will join us on the Amazon DEI journey.
I’m energized by the possibilities of what we can accomplish together at Amazon. I hope you are, too.