Microsoft and its 30% female employees: Global Diversity & Inclusion Report 2020

Microsoft is the well-known IT and technology company that operates in 190 countries around the world, it is based in Redmond and Satya Nadella is the CEO. 

Since 2014 the company publicly releases its annual workforce demographic data. 

The “Global Diversity & Inclusion Report 2020” was recently published, the document shows how diversity and inclusion are two fundamental aspects for the corporate culture. 

In this document the data offer a general overview of the company mission and show that the number of female employees within the company has reached 30.2%, + 1% compared to 2019. Five of the twelve members of the board of directors are women, two of the four board committees are chaired by women, and three of the members are racial or ethnic minorities. 

From 2016 to 2020 the number of women grew 41%; in this period  there has been a 55.4% increase in women managers, 79% in women directors, 80.4% in women executives and the number of women with technical roles increased 82.7%. 

The document also emphasizes the importance of the “equal pay for equal work” principle, the company pay employees equally for substantially similar work. As of September 2020, women in the US, Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, and United Kingdom combined earn 1.000 dollars for every 1.000 dollars by men in these geographic areas. 

On 23 October Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said: “We need to ensure that our culture of inclusion is a top priority for everyone. It starts with our values of respect, integrity, and accountability. Each of us must be able to thrive in diverse teams. Every manager must be able to attract, retain, and grow employees of all backgrounds. This is certainly true at Microsoft, and also more broadly. It is the new baseline for manager excellence across industries across the globe”. 

The reported data also show that, compared to 2019, the percentage of African American employees increased 4.7% (+ 0.3%), Asian employees 34.9% (+ 1.6%) and Hispanic employees 6.4% (+ 0.3%). 

The company would leave no one behind, in fact people with disabilities play an important role: they have been the catalyst of great innovations such as Live captioning in Teams, Learning Tools, Seeing AI, the XBox Adaptive Controller and many others. “People with disabilities make our company stronger,” says Jenny Lay-Flurrie (Chief Accessibility Officer) and adds: “by leaning into the talent and expertise of people with disabilities, we will make better products and services”. 

Microsoft feels a big responsibility to use its resources and position to improve diversity and inclusion, not just among employees, products and services, but also around the world. Actually, this seventh report is the proof of the progress to create an increasingly diversified and inclusive company.