An update on diversity and belonging at Airbnb

We are deeply committed to making our company, our community and the technology industry more diverse and accessible for everyone. Today, we are sharing updates on some of the steps we are taking to achieve these goals.

Partnering with experts 

We have long partnered with a range of individuals and organizations who are bringing the benefits of home sharing to more people and making the technology industry more inclusive: 

• To empower more people to benefit from home sharing, this year we launched the Airbnb Entrepreneurship Academy — an immersive Host training program for underserved communities – in the United States. The first Academy is running in rural North Carolina in collaboration with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and we look forward to expanding to other diverse communities in the future. This collaboration builds on work we have done with the NAACP and LULAC to expand the benefits of hosting to more communities of color.

• To help create a more diverse, inclusive workforce in the technology industry, we support the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the United Negro College Fund and Latinas in Tech, and we have signed the Hispanic Promise, “the first-of-its-kind national pledge to hire, promote, retain and celebrate Hispanics in the workplace.” Additionally,  we joined The Valuable 500, reaffirming our commitment to disability inclusion in our community and company. We’ve also forged partnerships with organizations including Disability:IN, Stanford VMware, ColorStack, and BeVisible, among others.

• We worked in partnership with the RainbowPUSH Coalition to ensure that 12 minority, women, and veteran owned financial services firms participated as underwriters in our IPO. This aligns with our ongoing commitment to partner with and support companies owned by minorities, women, veterans, members of the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities through our dedicated Supplier Diversity program. In 2020, we exceeded our goal of 10 percent US spend with diverse suppliers and in 2021 we added the goal of 20 percent of businesses in our US supply chain will be diverse as of 2025. As of August 2021, 13.5 percent of businesses in our US supply chain are owned by minorities, women, veterans, members of the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities.

Today, we are happy to announce a series of new initiatives that further these goals:

• Earlier this year, we joined OneTen, a coalition focused on closing the opportunity gap for Black talent in America.  This partnership focuses specifically on recruiting, retaining and advancing Black talent without a four year degree into family-sustaining careers, and builds on Airbnb’s efforts to expand diverse hiring and our living wage pledge.

• We are proud to serve on the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Advisory Council and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute’s Council Executive Committee to help further their work developing the next generation of leaders. We look forward to sharing more about additional initiatives to support these organizations. 

• We’ve partnered with Hello Alice to offer its community of nearly half million diverse small business owners an interactive program designed to help them supplement their business income through hosting, launching this fall. 

Advancing diversity and belonging at Airbnb

We are also sharing new data regarding our workforce. While the data we are releasing today demonstrates that we have made progress in key areas, we are not satisfied and believe we have more work to do to meet the high standards we have set for ourselves.

As a result of dedicated and intentional efforts over the last several years, our team has become more diverse: as of June 30, 2021, the population of US employees who identify as underrepresented minorities¹ is 13.3 percent, the highest it has been since we began collecting this data in 2014. 5.1 percent of employees identify as Black or African American, 8.0 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino, 0.4 percent identify as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 0.4 percent identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, 44.6 percent identify as Asian and Asian-American and 41.5 percent identify as white.²

Since 2019, the population of underrepresented minorities on our leadership team has increased 2.6 percentage points to 15.2 percent and the population of underrepresented minorities on our technical teams has increased by 1.6 percentage points to 8.5 percent.³ Additional details on the diversity of Airbnb employees are available here.⁴ We also recently filed our 2019 and 2020 EEO-1 reports; that data is available here.

Globally, the population of employees who identify in the gender binary⁵ as women is 47.2 percent, as of June 30, 2021. We are making progress in our efforts to ensure women are represented in our leadership and technical organizations: since 2019, the population of women in Leadership has increased by 3.7 percentage points to 41.6 percent, while the population of women in the Technical Organization has increased by 2.2 percentage points to 27.5 percent. While the overall percentage of women globally dropped 1.2 percentage points from 2019, we saw a 0.2 percentage point increase from 2020. We continue to improve gender diversity inclusion in our recruiting practices, and our data indicates that we are retaining male and female employees at roughly the same rate. Accordingly, we expect to make progress toward our 2025 goal of gender parity this year.

We have set long-term goals to promote sustained change: by the end of 2025, it is our goal that 20 percent of US employees will identify as underrepresented minorities and, at every level, 50 percent of our global employees who identify in the gender binary will be women. To help achieve these goals, we will continue to take deliberate actions to make our recruiting, promotion, and retention practices more inclusive. And because bringing on diverse talent is just one part of the puzzle, we continue to implement and uphold policies and programs to foster belonging in our workplace. Some of the work we are doing includes:

• Developing Diversity & Belonging Plan for each organization within the company that outlines specific time bound objectives, in addition to our company-wide 2025 goals. For example, our Tech group has established a Diversity Council comprised of senior leaders to further embed their plans into their organizations. 

• Expanding our training around diversity and bias removal, including offering classes focused on inclusive interview practices and training for hiring managers to help ensure they have tangible strategies to integrate diversity into their recruiting practices.

• Beginning to hire roles for our forthcoming technical hub in Atlanta, a city with a diverse local talent pool. We will be opening an office in the city, with plans to hire hundreds of technical and nontechnical roles over time. 

• Since 2017, we have required women and underrepresented minorities in the US to be presented on candidate slates when we hire for open roles.

• Supporting non-traditional career paths through our continued investment in our engineering apprenticeship program CONNECT to provide people from non-traditional technical backgrounds with an entry point to an engineering career at Airbnb. In 2020, 100 percent of participants became full-time Airbnb employees.

• Annual pay equity analyses to identify and adjust potential pay gaps.

• Increasing our investment in professional development, mentorship and sponsorship for women and underrepresented minorities, as well as those who actively advance diversity and belonging. Some examples of this work include offering ALL In, leadership development courses for members of our employee resource groups and our Global Diversity ambassadors, the McKinsey Black Leadership Academy, and reinvigorating our sponsorship program.

• Supporting 19 employee resource groups (ERGs). Each resource group is sponsored by a member of our executive team and works to support Airbnb employees and foster a sense of belonging at work. You can learn more about our employee resource groups here.

Additionally, we continue to expand our efforts to help us better understand the diversity of our employees and their experiences. Over the last two years, we’ve introduced additional identity fields that allow employees in the United States to voluntarily share their gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as more options so individuals who choose to do so can provide more specific information about their race and ethnicity. For example, employees in the United States can choose to share if they identify as East Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, West Asian and North African. We also provide the opportunity for US employees who choose to do so to share information about whether they identify as having a disability or if they are a parent or caregiver. These are important steps in allowing employees to be seen for who they are, and we look forward to sharing more of this data in the future.

We remain steadfast in our commitment to diversity and belonging, and are dedicated to working alongside our employees, our partners and our community to continue forging a more equitable world, inside and outside of our company.

¹Underrepresented minority (URM) is defined as individuals who identify as Black and/or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native, and two or more races inclusive of URM.

²As of 2019, we have updated the way we collect and report employee diversity numbers in the following ways:

• Race and ethnicity data is self-reported by US employees, and Airbnb seeks to honor our employees’ self-identification. As such, employees who select more than one race/ethnicity category are counted in each category they select. This differs from how the EEOC collects this information. We utilize this approach because we believe it offers our employees a more authentic way to share how they identify. When reporting the overall population of Airbnb employees who identify as underrepresented minorities, each employee is counted only once. 
• We define Leadership as individuals who are a Level 12 (which generally includes the equivalent of Director) and above. Previously, Leadership was defined as individuals who are a Level 11 or higher, have at least one direct report, who are not temps, contractors or interns.
• We define the Technical job category as three job functions: Engineering, Data Science (Analytics) and Information Technology. Previously, our definition of Technical included these three job functions and also included our Design and Product teams, and we also separately reported data for our Engineering team. 

³Data compares diversity data as of December 31, 2019 to data as of June 30, 2021.

⁴Certain elements of our recent URM and gender representation figures are undergoing external assurance, which may lead to changes in our methodology and/or results.

⁵Airbnb recognizes that gender identity is not binary. We are committed to approaching voluntary employee data in a way that offers our employees a more authentic way to share how they identify.