SurveyMonkey Releases Company’s First Diversity Report

Online survey developer SurveyMonkey ran their first ever external report on diversity and the California-based company learned that their global team is quite gender diverse, as women count for 45 per cent of their workforce.

The recently released Diversity Report found that female representation in technical roles grew by six per cent in the last year, making up 30 per cent of the current team. Women in leadership has also been on the rise, jumping up four points to 32 per cent. Today, 58 per cent of non-technical roles are occupied by women too.

SurveyMonkey set out to measure the company’s demographics to better understand where gaps remain and to study current inclusion practices to remove barriers, explained CEO Zander Lurie in a blog post.

“By creating an environment that strives to eliminate bias, we can unlock the true potential of all groups to thrive,” he said. “To enact true change, we need to hear, understand, and act on the voices and opinions of the people that demographics and statistics represent.”

Lurie said that he believes that all companies should be transparent and accountable when it comes to the demographics of their teams to help the industry become more diverse.

The report did reveal that although they have a quite a gender diverse team, SurveyMonkey lacks the same diversity when it comes to race. The company is addressing this gap by creating programs to help grow these numbers and partner with historically black colleges and universities in the United States.

While SurveyMonkey beats industry benchmarks for gender, Lurie called the bar “woefully low” and that the company is challenging themselves to raise it. They found that their U.S. teams were split on whether the workplace still presents obstacles for women and racial minorities.

“Of course, fixing a problem starts with acknowledging it, but when it comes to inclusion, we’re divided on if a problem even exists,” said Lurie.

A gender diverse team is good for a company’s bottom line. McKinsey’s Diversity Matters report released last year showed that companies with gender diversity are 15 per cent more likely to be profitable in their industry.

The CEO is making the survey available as a “benchmark-able template” for other companies so they too can measure the diversity of their workforce.