Opportunity parity is Adobe’s approach to examining fairness in internal promotions and horizontal movement across demographic groups. To the best of our knowledge, there isn’t any clear industry standard for how to measure or address opportunity parity. So, as part of our ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion, we are taking on the challenge.
As a starting point, we evaluated global promotion rates by gender and U.S. promotion rates by race/ethnicity. In September 2019 we publicly shared our first findings on opportunity parity. Next we added promotion rates by geographic region and job segment. We then refined a data methodology to accurately measure horizontal movement – employees taking on new roles inside the company that aren’t tied to promotion – and we shared those initial findings in September 2020.
Unlike pay parity, opportunity parity does not currently have industry benchmarks or best practices, so we designed our own metrics to understand movement across Adobe, including strong data governance practices to ensure accuracy.
* Underrepresented minorities (URM) are U.S. employees who identify as Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx, Native American, Pacific Islander, and/or two or more races.
Data source: Employee promotions and horizontal movement taking place in fiscal year 2020. An employee is counted as having a promotion if they move up to a higher job level (most common); move from a job where they track their work hours to one where they do not track their work hours; or move from an individual contributor job to a people manager job. An employee is counted as having a horizontal movement if they take a different role at the same job level (lateral move) or lower job level (learning move).
Only employees with self-disclosed gender and race/ethnicity information were included in the analysis. <1% of global Adobe employees have unknown gender and <3% of US Adobe employees have unknown race/ethnicity.