Dive Brief:

• Black and Latinx employees represented 15% of Etsy's 2019 hires in the U.S. — more than double the company's 2018 numbers, Elizabeth Spector Louden, the company's head of diversity and inclusion, said in a blog post Jan. 29. The majority of the hires at the e-commerce website were in the engineering field.
• By the end of 2019, black and Latinx employees also represented 11% of Etsy's U.S. workforce, an increase from 8.5% in 2018. As of Sept. 30, 2019, Etsy had 1,034 employees globally, a company representative told HR Dive in an email. The percentages of black and Latinx employees included in the announcement only reflect Etsy's U.S. workers. "We don't share country-specific figures but our U.S. employees make up the majority of our workforce," the representative said. 
• Louden said Etsy plans to roll out several diversity initiatives in 2020, launching a sponsorship program, expanding a mentorship program and focusing on veterans, older workers and those with disabilities. The company also will donate space in its Brooklyn headquarters to Code Nation, a tech education nonprofit teaching students in under-resourced high schools. More detailed diversity data will be included in Etsy's 2019 10K document to be released in late February 2020, according to the blog post.

Dive Insight:

Diversity, inclusion and equity are critical in building business value, and organizations that execute best practices tend to do better financially, according to research.

Analysts at The Wall Street Journal released a report in October 2019 concluding that the 20 most diverse S&P 500 companies generally performed better financially over five- and 10-year periods than non-diverse firms. The top companies had an average operating profit margin of 12%, compared with the 8% average profit margin of the least diverse companies. 

Along with a higher return on investment comes an increase in innovation, according to other research. However, a 2019 study in the Harvard Business Review found that the correlation only appears in companies where inclusion is embedded in the culture. That's where leadership comes in. 

Both the release of diversity and inclusion employee data by the country's largest tech companies and outside research, have shown that women and professionals of color are much less likely to hold leadership positions in the field.

But Etsy appears to be making strides in gender diversity in leadership as women account for at least 50% of the company's overall employee base, executive team and board of directors, Louden said in the blog post. The company's statistics on people of color in leadership is forthcoming.

According to Pinterest's most recent diversity report, the company's leaders are 75% male and 64% white; the percentages of black and Latinx leaders are 1% and 2%, respectively. But Pinterest did exceed set goals in hiring women engineers, underrepresented engineers and the hiring rate for underrepresented employees across the country.

Twitter's diversity and inclusion report released in December 2019 showed a significant increase in the number black and Latinx individuals it employs, but it said it needs improvement in women leadership. 

Maintaining D&I isn't a one-time goal; it's a continual process that requires monitoring and transparency, according to Nina Cofer, product marketing manager at Breezy HR. "Diversity and inclusion is not just an HR thing, it is a company thing," Cofer told HR Dive in an email in November 2019. "Everyone in the company should be kept aware of hiring goals related to D&I."