On Wednesday (Jan. 13), Netflix released its first “inclusion report” detailing how the company planned to strengthen diversity in its ranks.
“We started by listening to Netflix employees about how it was to work here,” Vernā Myers, Netflix’s VP of inclusion strategy, said in the report. “The company added inclusion as a cultural value in 2017, but here’s what we found: we weren’t as great as we thought we were or aspired to be.”
Over the last three years, Myers says that Netflix has “been building a foundation, sowing the seeds for inclusion to take root within the company.”
“We could do a much better job at recruiting Hispanic or Latinx and other underrepresented folks into all areas of our company, particularly our leadership,” she says.
Since 2013, Netflix has published diversity data on its website. Over the last few years, they found that 46.4% of its U.S. workforce and 42% of its U.S. leadership is made up of employees who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous and from other underrepresented ethnic backgrounds.
“We’ve made good progress, Myers said. “But let’s be clear, we’re not where we want to be, and we need to do better. We have a lot of work to do to attract more underrepresented folks to our company.”
To do this, the report explains Netflix’s plans to increase representation by training its recruiting team to be more inclusive, creating more access to emerging talent and building diverse networks.
“Once we get these folks in the door, we want Netflix to be the place they can build a great career,” Myers said. “All this work is necessary if we want to inspire cultural change in our industries.”