Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce and we have a responsibility both on our platform and in our company to create a more equitable and inclusive world of work. At LinkedIn, we “embody diversity, inclusion, and belonging” as a core value of our company – transcending annual plans, team structure, and programs – and use it to guide how we collaborate with our teammates, build our products, and make decisions about our business every day.
Each year, we take time to reflect on the pace of our progress toward building a more inclusive and equitable workplace. In fiscal year 2023, we continued our work to create an Environment of Belonging for every member of our workforce. We invested in the experience of all employees with a focus on growth and development opportunities for employees from historically and systemically marginalized communities. Although hiring slowed, we continued to nurture and widen our global talent pools in preparation for when recruiting cycles return.
Throughout the 2024 fiscal year, we will continue to adapt to the changing needs of our business and our employees, and continue to hold ourselves accountable for measuring the representation of key demographic groups within our workforce. As we share our progress, we remain more committed than ever to our global Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging strategy and our ongoing journey.
Building our Environment of Belonging
Building an inclusive workplace for all employees is enabled through the daily actions of our values-driven work. Across our 30+ global markets, each one of our colleagues plays an important role in building our culture, and our efforts touch all levels of our organization, from individual contributors to our executive team. We embrace a variety of identity dimensions in our work, including sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, ethnicity, race, and religion. We provide self-serve resources, tools, and live group trainings on an array of topics that empower our employees to show up as teammates and inclusive leaders every day.
In fiscal year 2023, more than 900 global people leaders (approx. 25 percent) completed at least one of three Leading Others academies where diversity, inclusion, and belonging are discussed as key leadership and management imperatives. Since launching our Inclusive Leadership for Managers initiative in 2020, 80% of our people managers have attended our foundational Leading with Inclusion training. More than 40% of managers have taken one or more additional learning actions, like using our Conversation Guides to facilitate scenario-based learning with their teams or taking advanced practical application courses through our Inclusive Leaders Studios. Our Executive Team also regularly connects with peer leaders from partner organizations like Out Leadership and Tanenbaum to discuss global employee trends and deepen their understanding of the experiences and perspectives of marginalized groups.
We believe allyship skills are a building block to inclusive leadership, creating better team environments, priming the next generation of leaders, and maximizing opportunities for our talent to thrive. We encourage the integration of allyship and inclusive leadership principles in our everyday work, from people management processes and meeting facilitation to how we schedule team events. Our annual Allyship Academy program has reached more than 1,000 colleagues worldwide and inspired advanced learning and mentorship opportunities for program alumni. Additional programs like Inclusive Practices for Individual Contributors and our global allyship webinar series focusing on everyday behaviors also enhance an environment of belonging within teams.
A foundational part of our work includes our thriving Employee Resource Groups (ERG). In fiscal year 2023, we launched our 11th global ERG, Habibi, which brings together employees who identify as Middle Eastern, Arab, North African, and allies to provide cultural awareness, education, and community building. With the growth of our ERGs, we revamped our Collaborate, Empower, Own (CEO) leadership development program available to 800+ ERG leaders and added a manager engagement component to develop and engage the managers of our ERG leaders. We also support the valuable contributions of our ERG leaders through executive coaching and our signature Distinguish program, designed to reward and recognize their impact on our business.
To make it easier to access support across a wide range of needs, like physical desk setup, mobility support, and assistive technology, we standardized our candidate and employee disability accommodations process this year. We built an internal content library with localized articles and guidance to increase disability awareness across our global workforce. For example, in Asia-Pacific, we partnered with Persol Challenge to deliver customized learnings in Japanese for all colleagues in our Tokyo office. We also released self-serve allyship guides related to disability topics and religious holiday awareness.
While we received external recognitions such as Disability:In’s Best Place to Work, Latinas In Tech Company of the Year, a 100 score on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, and Forbes’ Best Employers for Diversity 2023, we humbly acknowledge that the work of building an inclusive, world-class workplace is ongoing and embrace a mindset of continuous improvement.
Continuing our commitment
Nurturing talent from historically and systemically marginalized communities continues to be a cornerstone of our talent strategy. Three years ago, we made a commitment to double the population of senior U.S. Black and Latino employees (leaders, managers, and senior individual contributors) by fiscal year 2025. This commitment includes a specific focus on diversifying senior roles that hold key decision-making power to strengthen our business and employee confidence that opportunities for career growth and advancement are available to all at LinkedIn. Our ongoing progress reflects our efforts to ensure we are employing fair and unbiased processes to identify and consider qualified talent from historically and systemically marginalized communities for opportunities.
We met our commitment to double the population of senior U.S. Black employees in fiscal year 2022 and have seen the most significant progress in the growth of our U.S. Black and Latino Director+ populations. In three years, our U.S. Black Director+ and U.S. Latino Director+ populations grew 280.0% and 161.9%, respectively.
In fiscal year 2023, with slower hiring rates than in past years, we saw our U.S. Latino employee representation increase from 7.4% to 7.6%, while U.S. Black employee representation decreased slightly from 7.2% to 6.8%. We closed the fiscal year at 2.3 times our fiscal year 2020 population for senior U.S. Black employees and 1.9 times our fiscal year 2020 population for senior U.S. Latino employees. We also saw progress in gender diversity. Globally, women represent 46% of our Director+ leadership, growing 2% year over year, and 47.3% of our total employee base. Representation of women in technical roles also increased overall to 29.3%, growing 5.2% year over year.
We recognize we have more work to do to address opportunity areas and are focused on specific retention strategies to continue to advance our support for equity, inclusion, and belonging for Black and Latino individual contributors and managers. We partner with external organizations like We Are All Human and Blavity to provide network growth opportunities and continue to invest in our Black Inclusion Group (BIG) and Hispanics of LinkedIn Alliance (HOLA) ERGs. In addition, we curated strategic councils focused on the advancement of equity and inclusion for Black and Latino employees at the Director+ levels across LinkedIn and will continue to leverage these councils to enhance executive-level professional development and community building.
While we continue measuring our progress across key demographic groups, such as women globally and Black and Latino employees in the U.S., we know the numbers do not paint a complete picture of our workforce or of the representation of historically and systemically marginalized groups around the globe. To gain a more holistic understanding of our employee population, we launched the first phase of our Global Employee Self-ID (ESID) effort in fiscal year 2023. Enabling employees to voluntarily and confidentially self-identify across various dimensions like sexual orientation, caregiver status, gender identity, ethnicity, and more based on their country, will help us better understand the intersectional experiences and resources needed to continue to improve our workplace. Of note, ESID is currently available in seven markets, representing 93% of our global team.
Elevating the growth and development of our employees
In fiscal year 2023, we scaled our leadership development programs and growing portfolio of Talent Development learning offerings. Specifically, we expanded the curriculum for our Invest program, focused on the advancement of equity, inclusion, and belonging for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and welcomed a second cohort. Across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America, we scaled our LinkedIn Engagement and Development (LEAD) and Catalyst programs to create a greater impact for underrepresented racial groups in those regions through tailored offerings aimed at addressing the needs of managers and early-to mid-career employees. We also launched Steer, a new global career development program aimed at advancing equity, inclusion, and belonging for women at work, and piloted InspireHer, a community building initiative for U.S. Black, Latina, and Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Across Asia-Pacific, programs like EmpowerIn and Women in Tech Invest have surpassed five cohorts of women who have upskilled their influence and leadership skills while deepening their internal networks. As we continue scaling the reach of our programs, organizations like Shenomics in our Asia-Pacific region and The Diversity Practice in Europe will continue to be integral partners in creating meaningful leadership development opportunities for our employees across the globe.
We deepened the global reach of our programs, our understanding of how our employees identify, and what our teammates value in an inclusive workplace. As teams have embraced the flexibility of a hybrid work environment, we’ve adapted our programs to ensure an equitable experience regardless of where our employees choose to work. Our Mentor Circles program has also had a significant impact, helping new talent connect with a community of peers in their specific business function and supporting internal network development within their first three years. From in-person connection opportunities to delivering fully remote cohort experiences, our agility has created more ways for our employees to connect and feel that they belong.
Nurturing our future employees
In fiscal year 2023, amid slower hiring than in recent years, we focused on cultivating talent pools across the globe for future hiring. We continued to build our hiring pipeline through internal nurture programs and with the support of our valued external partners engaged throughout the regions we operate. For example, in Australia, we partner with CareerTrackers to develop nurture strategies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander talent pools. Through the partnership, our offices in Australia have also been building awareness and relationships with national indigenous community organizations. Our strategies to nurture new talent remain strong through our ERG community involvement and additional partners with organizations like Management Leadership for Tomorrow, /dev/color, The African Professional Network of Ireland, and Lesbians Who Tech.
Ensuring that our hiring ecosystem is equitable for all candidates is critical to our ongoing success. We make individual talent decisions based on the best candidate for the team, not based on social identity or to hit a representation goal. We also focus on equity within our talent systems and processes, providing comprehensive compensation education to managers and actively managing pay equity across our global workforce.
Our ongoing journey
In the year ahead, we’re strengthening our efforts to invest in our talent, with a focus on scaling high-impact programming and retention strategies for historically and systemically marginalized groups with high attrition.
This work is core to our vision to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. We also recognize that some have been left behind in access to opportunity, and we are uniquely positioned to drive toward more equitable outcomes. Fully embracing member experiences and taking action to build equitable workplaces was at the core of our collaboration with Dove to help end race-based hair discrimination through the CROWN Act. More than 450K+ professionals have taken learning courses on more inclusive and equitable work environments and the #BlackHairIsProfessional campaign has elevated stories on hair journeys at work reaching more than 300,000 members.
In any period of change and economic uncertainty, we believe what should remain constant are organizational values, and our members agree. We have a unique vantage point on the new world of work and our members want the assurance that the organizations they join are aligned with their personal values. The needs of our 985 million members remain at the center of our product development and led to the launch of our new job search filter to help job seekers match with opportunities aligned to their values. We strive to ensure that the culture and values we hold internally inspire the products that impact our external members as well.
As we progress toward our next fiscal year, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging remains a core operating principle and strategic focus. We’ll continue to adapt, evolve, and embrace inclusion as we listen to what’s most important for our employees and stay ahead of member trends that fuel the future of work.
