May 21, 2021 - News

CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion

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Over the last year, since the tragic murder of George Floyd, 23andMe has taken a number of steps to improve our approach in building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. We identified four focus areas that we’ve been making progress on over the past year, including:

  1. Hiring: Attract and hire top, diverse talent
  2. Employee Experience: Cultivate an inclusive environment that authentically celebrates our shared genome and unique differences. 
  3. Product & Research: Use our product to build and sustain Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in every customer and community interaction.
  4. Community Impact: Use our relationships to build diverse, equitable, and inclusive communities.

We have committed to holding ourselves accountable, while also rallying others to take action and be part of shaping a better future. To aid in these efforts, our CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki recently joined the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion™ pledge to collaborate with other organizations in order to further our DEI efforts. The coalition, which now includes more than 1,600 CEOs across 85 industries, is the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion within the workplace.

“Creating a more inclusive work environment and product is a lifelong journey that will require continuous input and feedback,” Anne said. “Joining this pledge will allow us to collaborate and learn from other organizations so that we can all build more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces and products.”

The pledge centers around four main commitments that align with 23andMe’s commitments to DEI. They include:

  • Cultivate trusting workplaces that can have complex, and sometimes difficult, conversations.
  • Implement and/or expand unconscious bias education.
  • Share best—and unsuccessful—practices. 
  • Create and share strategic inclusion and diversity plans with the board of directors (or equivalent governing bodies).

23andMe has already begun working on each of these four commitments, but this pledge offers another opportunity to hold ourselves accountable. We also hope that it will help encourage other companies to make similar moves toward creating more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplaces.

 

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