By Tony Xu, Co-Founder and CEO and Lisa Lee, VP of Global Culture & Belonging
DoorDash has thousands of employees in several countries across the globe, working together to serve and enrich diverse communities of stakeholders. We have the honor of connecting people with the best of their neighborhoods, and with that, we believe we also have a responsibility to cultivate more diverse and inclusive communities within our company, industry, and our cities.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are business imperatives at DoorDash. We believe that true innovation happens when everyone has the tools, resources, and opportunity to thrive. DEI is a tenet of our company because it is the right thing to do, and it makes us better in all we do.
Today, we are setting the first public benchmark for representation and pay equity across our corporate team and sharing how we can, and will, continue to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion across the organization.
In the last year, we have affirmed pay equity and made notable improvements in increasing gender representation across the company.1 We are optimistic about where we stand today and the direction in which we are headed. However, we know that we have significantly more work to do in order to create and maintain a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace––specifically, we must do more to advance underrepresented people of color.2
Pay equity across DoorDash
This year, we worked with a reputable third-party firm to conduct a comprehensive analysis of total compensation across the company and conduct a pay equity study for the first time. We have achieved pay equity on the basis of gender and race and ethnicity, and we can affirm we are an equal pay for equal work company.
Pay equity is part of our pay-for-performance philosophy and a foundational requirement to our broader DEI strategy. Across DoorDash, job-related factors – not gender, race and ethnicity – are the key factors driving employee pay. To maintain this ongoing commitment, we have also identified key milestones to hold ourselves accountable.
As we move forward, we will be working on a multi-faceted action plan, including the implementation of new policies, hiring and leadership trainings, as well as regular audits within our annual performance cycle to ensure we are maintaining equitable pay for employees across the organization. We have partnered with the Institute for Inclusive Leadership at Simmons University and are proud to be the first in our industry to take the White House Employers for Pay Equity Pledge to ensure and uphold pay equity for all. More broadly, we are dedicated to increasing representation for underrepresented people of color, women, and nonbinary people in technical and leadership roles, and in higher-paying positions throughout the company.
Significant increases for women and nonbinary people in leadership, and women and nonbinary people of color
We have increased representation of women and nonbinary people to 45% of our global team (+2pp YoY). Our most notable progress was at the leadership level, where we increased representation by 10 percentage points year-over-year (+10pp YoY). Today, 42% of employees on the global DoorDash Leadership Team (director level and above) identify as women or nonbinary people. Further, we increased representation by 2pp in technical roles,3 with women and nonbinary people now holding 22% of all technical roles at DoorDash.
We have made substantial progress in representation of women and nonbinary people of color, so that for the first time, the majority of women and nonbinary people on our U.S. team are women and nonbinary people of color (57%, +8pp YoY). Women and nonbinary people of color now comprise over a quarter of our total U.S. workforce (26%, +5pp YoY).
Over the last few years, we have deepened our investment in career accelerator programs aimed at providing personal development, manager support, and visibility with company leadership for underrepresented people of color and women and nonbinary people of all backgrounds. While we have made strides in increasing representation of women and nonbinary people in leadership roles, the next phase of our growth must focus on increasing the number of underrepresented women and nonbinary people of color at the leadership level and at DoorDash more broadly.
One-third of new hires and one-third of U.S. employees are underrepresented people of color
Today, nearly one-third of U.S. DoorDash employees are underrepresented people of color (32%). We are proud to have increased representation of underrepresented people of color by 4pp YoY, and with much of this progress attributed to our investment in recruiting employees from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in the U.S. As a result of this effort, we were able to double the representation of new hires identifying as Black and Latino/a/e in the last year, increasing the representation of underrepresented people of color to 38% of all new hires (+17pp).
We know that people of color face unique, systemic barriers to the quality of experience and advancement within their careers and organizations, and there is much more we must do to develop stronger support systems, increase visibility, and create opportunities for underrepresented people of color across the DoorDash team.
Establishing new, robust infrastructure to enable recruitment of diverse talent has made a notable impact on our efforts to improve representation at DoorDash over the last year. This includes DEI Training, through which members of our Recruiting team are taught to understand and mitigate bias, use inclusive terminology and shared language, influence change, and support candidates from underrepresented backgrounds throughout the hiring process. As DoorDash has continued to expand into new markets, we have also expanded our hiring beyond traditional tech hubs and have established partnerships with external organizations specifically focused on supporting diversity in recruiting, including National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), among others.
In the months ahead, we will focus on increasing the representation of underrepresented people of color in leadership and technical roles at DoorDash, two critical areas that stayed flat in the past year. It's crucial that as an industry, we reconsider the perception that DEI progress is dependent on recruiting and hiring; those are just one small piece of a successful DEI strategy, which must be holistic, stretching across the entire employee lifecycle, and put into practice day after day and year after year. Therefore, we are continuing to invest more in tools, programs, and company-wide best practices in order to better recruit, support, and retain existing talent, address turnover across underrepresented groups, promote the internal mobility and advancement of employees of color, place an emphasis on representation in business-critical and leadership roles, maintain pay equity, and more.
Committing to a more diverse, inclusive DoorDash
As we share our corporate demographics for the first time, we are sharing the progress we have made in affirming pay equity and improving representation across DoorDash––and using this as an opportunity to hold ourselves accountable to progress. We are also thrilled to have recently welcomed Asha Hope as our new Director of Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Asha has already begun working closely with DoorDash leadership and many of the broader Culture & Belonging team’s efforts. While Asha is overseeing the further development and enablement of our DEI strategy, this is work that falls across the entire organization and is the responsibility of every member of DoorDash, starting with our leadership.
To both address the specific areas in which we need to increase our DEI investments and to set clear demographic representation goals that reflect the broader population and communities we serve, we are committing to the following company-wide goals to increase representation for underrepresented groups by 2025:
- Underrepresented People of Color (U.S.): Goal of 8pp increase to 40% representation, and specifically –
- In technical roles: goal to increase from 7% to 10%
- In leadership (director level and above): goal to increase from 12% to 20%
- Women and Nonbinary People (Global): Goal of 5pp increase to 50% representation
- Emphasis on improving representation for women and nonbinary people of color, as well as gender representation in technical roles, people management and leadership
- CEO Staff and Board of Directors: Goal of 50% women, nonbinary people, and underrepresented people of color in new appointees
In addition to existing internal initiatives,4 these commitments are aimed at operationalizing and ensuring accountability for DEI at DoorDash, as we advance and strengthen a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and company culture. Early next year, we plan to release our company’s first ever Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report, where we will include more detail on our DEI initiatives and impact across all our stakeholder communities.
Where we stand today is as much a reflection of the work we have put into building and nurturing a diverse team as it is a reminder of the work that lies ahead. Pushing ourselves to get 1% Better Every Day is part of our DNA at DoorDash, and we refuse to be complacent as we continue to learn and grow, together.
If you are interested in learning more about our employee demographics and/or culture and belonging initiatives at DoorDash, please visit https://careersatdoordash.com/belonging. Interested in joining our global team? Browse and apply to one of our open roles.
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1All data examined pertains to corporate DoorDash employees and ranges from 7/1/2020 to 6/30/2021. Corporate workforce includes full- and part-time employees; does not include contractors, contingent workers, temp workers, or interns.
2At DoorDash, ‘underrepresented people of color’ includes all employees who self-identify American Indian or Native Alaskan, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino/a/e, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or Two or More Races; ‘people of color’ is used to refer to all non-white employees.
3At DoorDash, we define technical roles as those requiring technical skills, such as those within Software Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Analytics and Business Intelligence, Research and Design, Technical Program Management, and more.
4An example of one existing program is the DoorDash DEI Accountability Mechanism, which holds all employees at the director level and above accountable to increasing diversity, fostering inclusion on their teams. This initiative includes the consideration of individual DEI track records in approvals for leadership promotions and new hire candidates.
