Ensuring every employee grows and develops their career.
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.
Our FY2020 global gender and U.S. URM*/non-URM promotion rates are reflected below.
Fiscal 2020 promotion rate was 18.6% for women and 17.5% for men.
Fiscal 2020 promotion rate was 16.1% for U.S. URM* employees and 16.3% for non-URM employees.
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.
- Promotions: Promotion rates are calculated by counting the number of employees who moved up one or more job levels during the year, divided by the average headcount for the year.
- Horizontal movement: Horizontal movement rates are calculated by counting the number of employees who took a different job at the same or lower level, demonstrating an internal learning opportunity, divided by the average headcount for the year.
- Total internal movement: Notes the combined percentage of employees within the population who experienced either promotion or horizontal movement. (Promotions + horizontal movement = total internal movement.) Each employee is only counted once during the year, even if they experienced more than one move.
See additional details on FY2020 opportunity parity metrics across promotions, horizontal movement, and internal movement below.
* 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.
