It’s been a year of awakening and change across the U.S. and around the world. One year ago our CEO Rob Bearden vowed to take decisive action to make Cloudera a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place to work and have Cloudera take an active role in promoting those attributes in the tech industry and our communities.
There is no one size fits all solution to creating an intentional and strategic plan for a diverse workforce. What we have created over the past year, and will continue to create, is a plan unique to Cloudera that is based on data. Really digging into the data and understanding the unique fingerprint that Cloudera has, has led us to adapt and grow the commitments made last year.
Here’s a look at our progress report to show the steps we are taking to accomplish Rob’s initial DE&I commitments.
We formed an equality committee and hired a new Chief Diversity Officer.
Last year, our leadership team formed an equality committee dedicated to our DE&I efforts. Stacked with superstars from across the company, the team hit the ground running with quick impact and long term impact ideas, as represented by the program update above. Additionally, I was promoted from my role as Head of Diversity, Inclusion & Learning to fill the newly created CDO position. From there, I was enabled to build a team that would help take our efforts to the next level.
We took a hard look at the numbers.
We promised to reveal our diversity and inclusion numbers to hold ourselves accountable. While we continue to review our analytics, we’ve begun sharing our data on a public-facing DE&I web page, and will share comprehensive data on an annual basis. Our team is working with leaders and team members across the business to help narrow representation gaps. Are we where we want to be yet? No, but we’re working hard to get there.
We’re reaching beyond our walls.
To enact real change outside of Cloudera, we worked with the Cloudera Foundation, which has since merged with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, to create a Data4Change Accelerator program. It’s a fixed-term, nonprofit data exploration and analysis platform managed by Cloudera data engineers and operated on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Public Cloud. It essentially functions as an analytics sandbox that can handle large, complex datasets. The first cohort of five nonprofits also received $75,000 supplementary grants to cover expenses associated with running the nonprofit’s data exploration, including cloud-related costs.
Another initiative our leadership discussed implementing was creating a Center of Excellence (CoE) incubator with the goal of sponsoring an educational workspace for underrepresented high school minorities. We’ve started by partnering with the Boys & Girls Club of America in Middle Tennessee and Peninsula chapters to provide STEM, finance, marketing, professional development, and other relevant training and development opportunities. This work will help level the playing field for underserved high schoolers who will compete for internships and other academic pursuits.
We also created a $10,000 annual scholarship budget and are now in the process of creating professional internships for girls and underrepresented minority youth.
We provided new DE&I learning and development opportunities within Cloudera.
In the past year, we’ve launched several DE&I learning and development initiatives, including allyship training for the entire company, an inclusive leadership program for our executive team and Cloudera managers, and Bias Busters manager training, which included eight custom sessions that took place before our last review cycle.
Plus, to build a more diverse pipeline for leadership positions, we piloted a sponsorship program that paired 19 underrepresented minorities and women who work at Cloudera with executive sponsors and provided them with six months of executive coaching. The results of this pilot were overwhelmingly positive, for both the executives and their paired proteges, leading us to start another round of the program when it ended. Participants reported an increase in career development planning, desire to continue careers at Cloudera, and positive sentiment around inclusion and belonging.
We’re reviewing and addressing wage gaps.
We partnered with AON to perform a pay equity study and are in the final stages of aggregating the data from the regression analysis to share with the executive team. From there, we’ll determine next steps and correct pay discrepancies.
When I look back at all we’ve accomplished this last year, I’m proud. Yet I know there is much work to do to address the diversity issues prevalent in our industry. I remain hopeful and excited about the potential to make it—and Cloudera—more welcoming, fair, open, and accepting.
Learn more about our Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion efforts at Cloudera.
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