Dive Brief:

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco that his company has hired its first chief equality officer — a position focused on diversity and inclusion that will report directly to Benioff, TechCrunch reports.
• This move, while notable for its diversity efforts, reflects Benioff's continued contribution to community. TechCrunch noted Salesforce's 1/1/1 charity program, which has over the years given "over $128 million in grants" and allowed employees to volunteer more than 1.6 million hours in their communities.
• This new position will be responsible for "building those values into the fabric of the organization," TechCrunch reports.

Dive Insight:

Diversity is a continued problem for the tech sector, in particular, and many have turned to diversity leadership in order to bring actionable solutions to the problem. Airbnb, Asana, Autodesk and Dropbox are all companies that have called for diversity leadership in the recent past.

Creating a position on the matter that directly reports to the CEO not only makes the company outwardly look as though they are giving diversity initiatives their due — it may be one key to making such initiatives work. Salesforce's position seems as though it will also be involved in the company's other community initiatives, as well, which may be a strong place to start to help the company create more robust equality programs overall.