Diversity, inclusion, and belonging at GitHub

Our People Pillar represents the ongoing investments we have in hiring a diverse global workforce, growing careers within GitHub and creating a culture where everyone belongs and can thrive. Our initiatives in the People Pillar include our company-wide commitment to a DI&B; Learning Journey, and increasing representation with goals for hiring, promotions, and retention.

Providing employees with the support they need

The year 2020 is one of challenges and extremes. We achieved many of our goals for GitHub as the platform for all developers, adapting to address challenges initiated by the global pandemic, social and political issues, and climate change. The way we supported and cared for one another during these crises became a testament of our culture in action in our communities. Here are some of the investments we’ve made this year:

COVID-19 services and support

We implemented or expanded employee programs to support Hubbers in adapting to periodic lockdowns, travel restrictions, school closures, reduced community services, and isolation from friends and  family.

We introduced Flexible Work Arrangements, such as half-day scheduling, to accommodate home schooling, four-day work weeks, part-time work arrangements, or rotating days off.

• Hubbers are provided with an additional two weeks of pandemic leave to manage their own wellness or care for others.
• Our eight weeks of Family Leave are available for extended care for dependents.
• We extended Family Services to locate childcare providers, tutoring, and learning resources for home-schooled children.
• We introduced Flexible Work Arrangements, such as half-day scheduling, to accommodate home schooling, four-day work weeks, part-time work arrangements, or rotating days off. Each team collaborated on how to support one another’s work-life balance by prioritizing and adjusting schedules.
• We provided manager training to support teams in addressing Hubbers’ concerns about impact to job performance, advancement opportunities, or burn out.

We encourage Hubbers to access mental health services through our benefits providers, and every Hubber receives a monthly wellness stipend for their personal use. We continue to provide Hubbers with an annual budget of $2,000 for their own career learning and development.

Engagement

We creatively virtualized engagements for mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

We implemented a company-wide “no meeting Tuesday” to ensure Hubbers have uninterrupted time to create and think, and more flexibility to plan their work week.

• Our beloved in-person mini-summits were converted into virtual events to enable team building.
• We implemented a company-wide “no meeting Tuesday” to ensure Hubbers have uninterrupted time to create and think, and more flexibility to plan their work week.
• We introduced virtual coffee hours and featured local musicians to help support impacted artists during this time (you can find us online enjoying “Coffee and Beats”).
• We introduced virtual yoga, meditation, and yoga for kids; hosted guest speakers; and sent out care packages with Octocat-emblazoned socks, sweats, slippers, and blankets.
• We increased the frequency of our company communications and added forums for additional dialogue to support our rapid growth and maintain connection while working remotely.

We invest in opportunities for internal dialogue to reinforce our culture and respond in a timely way to areas of improvement. We centralized much of our internal communication onto GitHub and have been enjoying our enhanced Discussions and Project features to increase our own internal collaboration.

Our DI&B; learning journey

We are making a significant investment in DI&B; by creating shared language and understanding through Hubber learning journeys: Getting Started, Getting to Know Yourself and Your Identity, Getting to Know Others and Inclusion Dynamics, and Becoming an Informed Ally. These training and immersive learning experiences are designed to help Hubbers understand complex topics like unconscious bias and covering, while providing a set of inclusive capabilities and behaviors to navigate individual journeys, including how to become an active and informed ally.

We are making a significant investment in DI&B; by creating shared language and understanding through Hubber learning journeys.

GitHub: A place for every Hubber to do their best work

Our purpose is to make GitHub a place where every current and potential Hubber can find their community and do their best work, and to do this, we’ve invested in several areas.

Flexibility in how and when we work is one of the ways we can meet the wide range of individual needs of Hubbers in a diverse global workforce. COVID-19 increased our focus on encouraging alternative ways of working so that Hubbers could adapt to a variety of personal situations—from having children or other family members at home, to working in small spaces with roommates, to being alone and far from loved ones. GitHub will continue to accommodate flexible work arrangements as an important strategy to attract and retain a diverse workforce where we value work-life balance.

Our purpose is to make GitHub a place where every current and potential Hubber can find their community and do their best work.

Distributed work has been in GitHub’s DNA since our beginning, so it was a natural shift for us to adopt a “remote first” culture, allowing employees to be located where they can do their best work.

Communities of Belonging (CoB)

Our efforts go far beyond just where we work, and are deeply rooted in how we work. As a foundation to inform our Four Pillar efforts and leverage the uniqueness that we have within GitHub, we collaborate with our Communities of Belonging (CoB) and Inclusion Advisory Council (IAC) to guide and inform our priorities and plans of action.

As the current climate of the world has kept us physically farther apart than ever, our network of CoB have become vital to the sense of belonging for many of our Hubbers. These groups are very active, and have a meaningful impact not only within our GitHub community, but with our worldwide community of developers.

The IAC was created to model and facilitate inclusive practices in Hubbers’ daily interactions. This council informs and participates in the DI&B; roadmap and strategy, and reviews and recommends inclusive policies and practices to implement at the company and team level.

As the current climate of the world has kept us physically farther apart than ever, our network of CoB have become vital to the sense of belonging for many of our Hubbers. These groups are very active, and have a meaningful impact not only within our GitHub community, but with our worldwide community of developers. Some examples of this work include the Octogatos sponsoring and contributing to Code4PuertoRico and Code for Venezuela, and our Blacktocats sponsoring the Hackathon for Nigeria and Floss and Code. The Adacats developed an internal mentoring program that is now being adopted across the company, and the Octoqueer engaged as allies for social change to assist affected communities. This year, we also welcomed two new groups to our network: Parentocats and OctoAsians.

Each community is unique and sets a thoughtful agenda based on the passion and interests of the group.

Learn more about our Communities of Belonging → Learn more about our CoB →

Our Platform Pillar represents a body of work that shapes GitHub and influences common practices in our community. Our products, platform, and ecosystem must be designed for the vibrant global developer community that we serve. The Platform team works on issues of accessibility, language, design, localization, cultural behaviors, and norms. We are also uniquely positioned to leverage our platform for positive influence by highlighting important open source work and supporting civic engagement.

Strengthening the platform during a pandemic

Worldwide, COVID-19 is having a more severe impact on minority populations. From March through June 2020, we donated GitHub developers’ time to work directly with scientists, universities, government officials, open source programmers, and concerned citizens to help better support COVID-19 research and communities in need. Our developers poured their hearts and talent into projects with an ongoing impact on rapid worldwide learning, including showing the patterns of disparate impact to ethnic minorities and raising awareness and action.

Our developers poured their hearts and talent into projects with an ongoing impact on rapid worldwide learning, including showing the patterns of disparate impact to ethnic minorities and raising awareness and action.

COVID-19 had an immediate impact on many student developers who had accepted internships in the tech industry for the summer of 2020, many from underrepresented backgrounds already hit hard by the economic impact. Through our GitHub Education team, we became a sponsor and active collaborator with Major League Hacking (MLH) to create a virtual fellowship experience, selecting and managing project teams, and identifying host companies such as AWS, Facebook, and Twilio. We placed 155 Fellows in 36 open source projects, in 23 global locations across 15 time zones. We will continue to support MLH in extending global internships in 2021.

We also developed guidance around the language we use to communicate both internally and externally, introducing an inclusive language  guide.

GitHub joined Microsoft’s initiative to help 25 million people worldwide acquire new digital skills in response to the global economic crisis spurred by the pandemic. We are also offering GitHub Learning Lab as a free resource to help job seekers practice the skills needed for in-demand jobs and pursue software development roles.

We’ve matched millions of dollars in sponsorship from the community and saw tens of thousands of funders sponsoring independent developers.

We exceeded our expectations with our GitHub Sponsors program in establishing a means for developers to make a living through open source. We’ve matched millions of dollars in sponsorship from the community, and saw tens of thousands of funders sponsoring independent developers as well as a huge uptick in sponsorship since the pandemic began.

As a global community, monitoring and setting standards for inclusive language in our platform is an ongoing opportunity. This year, we coordinated with industry partners and the Git community more broadly to drive the work to change the default branch name for new GitHub repositories from master to main and are now working with a number of other organizations to make this an industry-wide change.

We also developed guidance around the language we use to communicate both internally and externally, introducing an inclusive language guide available to all Hubbers to increase awareness on how we all contribute to an even more inclusive culture.

We are very proud of our Philanthropy Pillar and our ongoing commitment to give back and combine our resources with others. We have a tradition of service projects at GitHub, and have found ways to serve our communities by giving our time even during the pandemic. We are expanding our philanthropy by leveraging GitHub’s Social Impact efforts to support impacted marginalized communities with financial contributions, education and training, and technology.

Giving back to the community

The giving spirit of our company and our Hubbers showed up at its best this past year. Our Policy and Social Impact teams were significantly impactful through philanthropy, tech for social good, advocacy, and civic engagement on critical social and policy issues for developers.

Hubbers gave back to communities where they live and work in unprecedented numbers: We saw a 300% increase in Hubber giving this past fiscal year, with over $3.4M donated to thousands of nonprofits across the world.

In the past fiscal year, GitHub’s philanthropic investments included $1.3M to both emerging and persistent social issues with a strong racial equity lens, from supporting Bay Area communities disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, to investing in Black-led organizations that advance racial equity, and building capacity for grassroots nonprofits that support migrant and immigrant communities. Hubbers gave back to communities where they live and work in unprecedented numbers: We saw a 300% increase in Hubber giving this past fiscal year, with over $3.4M donated to thousands of nonprofits across the world.

In response to the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, we initiated a company-wide, cross-functional effort to understand how GitHub can better leverage its business assets to contribute to racial equity. As part of this effort, we are encouraging and supporting developer and Hubber civic engagement in the upcoming U.S. elections to make sure that their voices are heard in the democratic process.

Our Policy Pillar represents the voice we have in the industry to help inform and influence issues that affect developers. We will continue to build relationships, participate in forums, write briefs, and provide expertise on issues to protect developer rights and freedoms. We advocate for legislation or policy change in areas such as immigration, criminal justice reform, trade, privacy, open source, intellectual property, content moderation, and many more.

We firmly believe that global collaboration is essential for addressing global challenges that have the most impact on those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Advocating for developers

GitHub joined four amicus briefs this year to oppose changes to the public charge rule, argue against the suspension of issuance of certain visas (including H-1B, H-2B, J, and L), defend the Optional Practical Training program for student developers, and support international students’ ability to remain in the U.S. while taking courses that had been moved online due to the pandemic. This advocacy was grounded in supporting immigrant Hubbers, in addition to our community of developers around the world. We firmly believe that global collaboration is essential for addressing global challenges that have the most impact on those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Importantly, we encourage and support civic engagement for all Hubbers globally.

Online harassment is another area that can impact our personal and professional lives and destroy trust in our community. Our Trust & Safety team collaborated with our Physical Security team and Hubbers to update our Harassment Response Guide, increasing awareness and education internally. We will continue to learn and introduce practices in moderating behavior on GitHub, and enable open source maintainers to more easily moderate activity in their projects on GitHub to ensure a safe and trusted home for everyone.

Importantly, we encourage and support civic engagement for all Hubbers globally. In the lead up to the U.S. 2020 elections, we’ve signed onto Time to Vote and Civic Alliance and have committed to a half-day off (or more as needed) for voting or other civic engagement as appropriate to our employees’ and their local communities. This includes encouraging Hubbers to serve as poll workers, providing a $250 donation credit to those who volunteer via our giving platform, and using our platform to promote civic engagement to the broader developer community.