Peer-to-peer marketplace Etsy has released its first diversity report since going public last April, showing that people who identify as women make up 50% of the leadership and management roles at the company. In 2014, women held just 37% of leadership roles at the company. What’s also notable about this report is that it represents gender in a non-binary way.
As of December 2015 at Etsy, 53.9% of employees identify as female, 45.6% of employees identify as male and 0.5% identify as “other.” Employees had the option to self-report gender from a list of more than 60 options. Those that fall into other are the ones who did not identify as cisgender male/man or cisgender female/woman.
“This reflects our belief that gender lies on a spectrum, and follows operational changes we’ve made in the last year, such as converting our bathrooms to be gender inclusive,” Etsy Director of Culture & Engagement Juliet Gorman wrote on the company blog.
Regarding racial diversity, Etsy has slightly improved since 2014 — meaning the company is slightly less white and more inclusive of Latino/as and blacks — but still has a quite a bit of work to do. Etsy is currently 78.6% white compared to 79% white in 2014. In leadership roles, white people make up 76.9% of the population.
“While we’ve made improvements to how we measure and report our diversity data, we think there are ways we can better showcase how a full range of identities often intersect and affect each other,” Gorman wrote. “We hope to explore different methods for measuring and reporting that will contribute meaningfully to the larger public dialogue around tech and diversity.”
Acknowledging and reporting how certain identities intersect and interact is important because they can, and do contribute to societal inequalities and injustices. As I’ve previously mentioned, we need to look at diversity in tech through the lens of how all of our intersecting identities contribute to our experience. That includes race, gender, age, disability status, sexuality and so much more.