This year, much of our responsibility to cultivate greater equity and inclusion rightly focused on the new normal introduced by COVID-19. The pandemic shined a spotlight on the considerable inequities that persist globally across many dimensions, including gender, caregiver status, race and socioeconomic status. Although everyone has felt the impact of the pandemic, we know it has been significantly more challenging for lower-income communities, caregivers and people of color. Uber’s 2020 People and Culture Report reflects this challenging year and its impact on our workforce, policies and day-to-day work. 

Due to the impact the pandemic was having on our business, in May we made the extraordinarily difficult decision to reduce our global workforce by about 25%. These changes slowed the progress of our diversity recruiting efforts and of course also affected the composition of our global workforce. As hiring slowed down, we radically shifted our approach to further developing the talent we already have, and worked hard to support our team in the remote workplace by introducing important policies to enhance caregiver flexibility and mental health support.

In the midst of the global health crisis, 2020 has also been marked by a crisis of racial injustice, brought to the fore by the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and too many others. We have witnessed a massive call to action that requires us all to dig deeper and to leverage our resources for social and racial equity. To help fight the racism that persists across society, we made a strong stance and pledged to be an anti-racist company. 

Over the past year, we made meaningful progress in increasing the diversity of our leadership population due to our focus on developing talent, such as targeted sponsorship programs for women and underrepresented groups. Here are a few noteworthy year-over-year changes (March 2019 versus August 2020): 

  • The global population of women in tech grew 7.6% and women in leadership grew 15.1%.
  • In the US, the populations of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx employees in tech grew by 21.3% and 16.8%, respectively.
  • Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx employees in leadership grew by 30% and 50%, respectively.

We remain laser focused on increasing representation of women and Black/LatinX individuals in leadership roles, on Black/African American and Hispanic/Latinx employees overall, and on establishing inclusive operating norms and beliefs where people of all backgrounds can find a sense of belonging. To learn more about Uber’s approach and to read our 2020 People and Culture Report, please visit uber.com/diversity.