Netflix's First Inclusion Report Admits Need for More Hispanic Employees

By Dana Cruz First Posted: Jan 18, 2021 05:43 AM EST

(Photo : Jade87 from Pixabay ) Netflix

Netflix released its first inclusion report on Wednesday and acknowledged that it needs to add more Hispanic employees in its roster.

Netflix has been producing diversity reports for every quarter since 2013 but the inclusion report was part of the company's holistic look at rates of recruitment, retentions and promotion of underrepresented groups like Hispanic employees.

It was the first time representation data was presented concisely by Netflix, said a report from Tech Crunch.

It showed where the company fell short and how it seeks to improve representation, as well as areas that it made progress in, noted Quartz at Work.

Hispanic employees who held positions in the company rose from 6% to 8.1% from 2017 to 2020.

Despite the rise in Hispanic employees in Netflix, those in leadership positions have remained on a basically flat level as it did three years before.

But those in leadership positions (director and above) only inched up 0.4% over the same time frame.

About 8,000 People from Underrepresented Groups Work at Netflix

Overall, people with underrepresented racial or ethnic backgrounds (Black, Latinx or Hispanic, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, Asian and Pacific Islander) made up 46% of the total workforce in Netflix.

That means, the company has about 8,000 people from the said group, and 42% of them are in leadership roles.

Representation of people of color in Netflix's leadership is not perfect, to say the least, it fares better than its other counterparts in the tech industry.

Minorities in Netflix leadership roles are 15.7% Asian, 9.5% Black and 4.1% of Netflix's higher-ups are mixed race.

On the other hand, women make up almost half of Netflix's workforce at 47.8%, even those in leadership roles.

Netflix also admitted that is still has many things to learn about inclusion and representation outside of the U.S., a struggle that is has to face as a multinational company, noted the company's vice president of inclusion strategy Vernā Myers.

Netflix's Strategy to Address Racial Gaps Includes Several Strategies

Racial gaps in big tech companies, to which Netflix is often compared to, is varied depending on sizes and operations.

This makes drawing up conclusions on existing diversity data across their workforce a difficult task to accomplish as a whole.

The easiest and clearest way to look at these data is to compare top ranking employees of each companies and putting more people in minority groups in roles where they have better influence and power.

Variety also quoted Myers who said that Netflix can also approach the problem of representation by looking "beyond charting demographics and hiring goals by looking at the entire employee experience."

So the company is working towards increasing representation by expanding its recruiting programs team that trains its recruiters on how to hire more inclusively.

Myers wants to see the company work on inclusion internally first, before moving on externally as she argued that internal changes will start to reflect on the things they do externally.

The team also helps Netflix and senior leaders diversify its networks and create more programs that support access to emerging talent.

The inclusion report can be viewed as a short film on YouTube.