Diversity, inclusion, and belonging at GitHub
As the world's largest and most advanced development platform in the world, we know that we have a responsibility to not just promote, but embody diversity, inclusion, and belonging. There are 65+ million developers, 200+ million repositories, and 3+ million organizations on the platform. Like the composition of GitHub itself, these developers come from all over the world. By being globally diverse ourselves, we are better able to foster creativity, collaboration, and belonging—and truly become a home for all developers.
A year of progress
During a difficult year where the pandemic has continued to impact our personal and professional lives, we've remained dedicated to a promise we made to our community and to ourselves: making GitHub and the global tech industry more equitable. We are proud to say we saw significant growth in our minority representation, whose population increased at a higher rate than the company itself. Still, the tech industry lags in diverse composition and we acknowledge we still have work to do. We intend to keep this positive momentum going as we look to the future.
Learn more about this dataA year of empathy
In a year that has seen many uncertainties, Hubbers remained dedicated to creating a more inclusive world, raising funds for equality causes, creating awareness for disparity, and providing humanitarian aid. In FY21, over $2.5 million was donated by our employees, supporting nearly 2,000 nonprofit organizations around the world. In December 2020, GitHub Gives—a pillar event for our Social Impact team—galvanized Hubbers to give back to their communities. The organizations that received the most support were those focused on civil rights, social action, and advocacy causes, including Black Lives Matter, Coded by Kids, Black Organizing Project Inc., Arrabon, and the West Side Justice Center.
A year of community
GitHub is dedicated to building a community that reflects our world, and our Communities of Belonging are key to building that culture of inclusion. These self-directed teams provide a safe space for Hubbers whose identity unifies them. They provide meaningful connections between Hubbers—a place to celebrate and learn from one another. They are supported and sponsored by leadership, and play a critical role representing a broad set of experiences and passions that Hubbers bring every day. This year we welcomed new emerging affinity groups, a sign of the plurality celebrated every day at GitHub.
Git it together
We commissioned artist I AM SOTERIA to create and perform a spoken word piece all about the impact and legacy of the Blacktocats.
Learn more about our Communities of Belonging Learn about our communities
A year of open source
Earlier this year, we launched All In, a program that brings together corporate partners, industry leaders, researchers, and foundations to advance diversity and inclusion within open source with a focus on access, community, equity and data. The goal is to create a more inclusive open source for developers everywhere. Key initiatives of All In include the 2021 Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Survey in partnership with the Linux Foundation, a program to provide support to maintainers who are looking to promote diversity in their communities, and career development support for students from underrepresented backgrounds.
A year of social equality
Recognizing that our world requires intentional action to solve disparities, we started Tech for Social Good, a portfolio of programs from the GitHub Social Impact team that focuses on open source capacity building in the social sector. It has supported the World Health Organization in COVID-19 response and recovery, created an open source community that engages women of color around the world, and connected GitHub staff to technical volunteer projects to create a more equitable world. The team also launched a research project on open source software developers in four low- and middle-income countries: Kenya, Egypt, India and Mexico to better understand the developer communities and their priorities.
A year of stars
We acknowledge that being and feeling invisible is a common and unfortunate experience of minorities. To counter that reality, we created a special community for a diverse range of open source leaders called the GitHub Stars. This program puts a spotlight on influential developers of diverse backgrounds and experiences who go above and beyond to inspire and educate communities. This year, we increased our Stars by almost 90% and added representation from 20 more countries, including Mozambique, Colombia, Singapore, and Estonia. While our Stars are spread across the globe and have varied technology expertise and backgrounds, one thing that they all have in common is that they nurture the developer community.
A year of amplification
The ReadME Project is our platform to share a diverse range of stories and voices in the global open source community: the maintainers, developers, and teams whose powerful contributions move the world forward every day. This year, the platform covered stories of organizations striving to lower the barriers of entry into software development. This includes Python and PyLadies, which addresses open source gender parity for women in OSS; She Code Africa, which makes technology training and careers more accessible to women in Africa; and Data for Black Lives and BlackInData, both of which have missions to democratize data and make the field more inclusive for Black Americans.
A year of affirmation
This year we brought on a team of experts to guide our DI&B practice internally and externally. You can see their great work in our newly launched page, which illustrates how we infuse diversity and inclusion throughout our entire business strategy. While we continued our work of deploying mandatory learning paths that start with the basics (like bias and privilege), we also began converting our learning into practice, on topics like neurodiversity, gender identity, accents, and multiculturalism.
A year of advocacy
In January, we announced that GitHub obtained a license from the US government to provide cloud services to Iranian developers, making GitHub fully available to developers and organizations in Iran. We continue to advocate for policies ensuring that no one is excluded from contributing to the future of software.
It has been a year of exponential growth, and our commitment is to continue our path with an intentional approach to represent the global developer community— where people with different backgrounds and experiences can thrive.
GitHub by the numbers
This past year saw numerous unique challenges, but through it all, diversity remained a priority for us. Here are some highlights.
Growth
2021 has been a year of exponential growth. Our global employee population grew +41.2%, and outside the US, it grew +65.2%.
Representation of women grew a full percentage point, increasing their population globally by +43.7%.
As GitHub has grown, so have our minority demographics, increasing at a higher pace year over year. In 2021, the population of Asian, Latinx, and Black Hubbers in the US nearly doubled.
The number of Black employees grew by +47.2%, outpacing US population growth, and our Latinx employee population increased +29.4%.
Gender **
While the GitHub population grew by +41.2% year over year, the representation of women increased by +43.7%.
Our overall representation of women reached 29.6%, an increase of one full percentage point. At the technical level, representation of women increased by +2.5 percentage points to 22.1%. Women represented 31.3% of management positions, above their representation and strengthening the leadership pipeline. Additionally, women made up 36.4% of the new-hire population.
It is important to mention that we saw the number of Hubbers who did not self-identify as Male nor Female double in a year. This trend gives us hope and reaffirms our commitment to allow our employees’ freedom to self-define as who they truly are, whether we identify with one gender, or none, or both, or neither, and choose to share that with others (or not).
Race and ethnic minorities (US)**
Since our last report, our Black, LatinX, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Multiracial populations all saw improvements in representation.
Our Black Hubber population, in particular, doubled in the past two years (from FY19 to FY21), and had an annual growth rate in FY21 of +47.2%, which was higher than that of GitHub US.
Other populations had similar improvements: The number of Asian, LatinX, and Multiracial US Hubbers nearly doubled in the past two years. And we saw the intersection of women who are Black, LatinX, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Multiracial also increase their representation.
While these achievements are a reason to be proud, we acknowledge there is room to grow—especially with Black and LatinX representation in management.
Mirroring the last census results in the US, we saw that the category of Multi-Race grew the most—a sign of how our overall demographics are changing in the US toward a more racially converging society.
White 67.3%
Asian 15.5%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.6%
African-American/Black 5.4%
Multiracial 3.8%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.4%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 70.4%
Asian 14.8%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.9%
African-American/Black 4.2%
Multiracial 2.2%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.5%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 72.6%
Asian 15.3%
Hispanic/Latinx 5.5%
African-American/Black 3.3%
Multiracial 3.3%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.0%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 57.8%
Asian 22.0%
Hispanic/Latinx 6.4%
African-American/Black 6.8%
Multiracial 6.4%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.6%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 69.6%
Asian 15.1%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.4%
African-American/Black 4.7%
Multiracial 2.9%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.3%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 72.2%
Asian 15.1%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.2%
African-American/Black 4.3%
Multiracial 1.0%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.1%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 72.1%
Asian 14.7%
Hispanic/Latinx 6.2%
African-American/Black 3.9%
Multiracial 3.1%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.0%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 61.0%
Asian 21.6%
Hispanic/Latinx 5.7%
African-American/Black 6.2%
Multiracial 5.2%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.2%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
Senior leadership roles **
Women now represent 22.1% of GitHub’s senior leaders**, growing as a community by +54.0% year over year. This improvement can also be seen in the representation of our racial and ethnic minorities in the US, including Black, LatinX, Asian and Multiracial. This is a testament to our intentional efforts to make our leadership more inclusive and provide diverse role models to the future generations in our upper ranks.
It has been an exciting year of growth, and our commitment is to continue our intentional approach to represent the global developer community. Because GitHub is the home for all developers—where people with different backgrounds and experiences can thrive.
This data reflects the state of diversity at GitHub as of June 30, 2021, unless otherwise noted.
The gender data above include employees who have self-identified as man or woman. Those who did not identify as either, or willingly opted to not self-disclose, are not counted in either group (man or women), nor in the denominator. We honor their choice not to be restricted by a binary system. The representation of women if they were added to the denominator would be 29.3%. ↩
We are aware that the standard reporting categories mandated by the U.S. federal government don’t currently support the diverse range of identities celebrated and represented among Hubbers. We are hopeful this will change in the future. ↩
The phrase, “senior leaders” represents employees who fall into compensation grades 10 and 11, which is the equivalent to a Director and Senior Director-level roles. ↩
We reserve the right to supplement data in this report with additional information throughout the year to keep it updated and relevant. Historical numbers may differ slightly due to rounding and refinements in methodology year over year.