We are proud to announce that Age of Learning has joined SurveyMonkey and other top tech companies (including 23andMe, Box, Chime, Eventbrite, Genesys, Headspace, Intuit, Leaf Group, PagerDuty, Slack, Tile, Tinder, Upwork, and Zoom) in a new initiative to track the representation of traditionally marginalized groups working inside their vendors, including law firms, technology services suppliers, food suppliers, landlords, marketing agencies, investment banks, and auditors.
Unlike vendor diversity programs of the past (which are typically limited to tracking minority ownership), this new initiative will use a simple survey to also track the representation of women, racial minorities, and LGBTQ individuals within a vendor’s employee base, leadership team, and board of directors. It will evaluate the vendor’s use of inclusive practices for recruiting, retaining, and advancing members of traditionally marginalized groups as well.
“Improving diversity, equity, and inclusion is an industry-wide challenge for the technology sector,” said Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey. “We have work to do within our own businesses to become anti-racist. We also want to help upend the systemic bias we know still exists in the broader business community. This new initiative enables us to turn diversity, equity, and inclusion into a business metric that will drive accountability in the organizations we rely on to power our companies. Better data will lead to more accountability and—ultimately—progress on critical diversity initiatives.”
Age of Learning and other participating organizations have agreed to begin laying the groundwork for collecting diversity and inclusion data from new and existing vendors within the next 30 days, and to incorporate supplier diversity into decision-making over the long term. The companies will continue to collaborate and develop best practices for using their budgets to push for change within the broader business community.
Of the initiative, dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and SurveyMonkey Board Member Erika James said, “This is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to untangling the complicated factors that lead to underrepresentation across corporate America. There’s power in these companies coming together to take a stand and leverage their budgets to make an impact. No one company can have the impact that the collective can.”
The program was created in collaboration with the social impact consultancy The Justice Collective, which will continue to provide support to participating companies and their vendors. Additional resources and a link to the vendor workforce diversity survey template can be found at surveymonkey.com/equity.