Oct 29, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Intel Achieves Goal of Full US Workforce Representation, Notes It’s Just the Beginning

What’s New: Intel has achieved full representation in its U.S. workforce two years ahead of its 2020 goal. The company’s workforce now reflects the percent of women and underrepresented minorities available in the U.S. skilled labor market. This achievement was the result of a comprehensive strategy that took into account hiring, retention and progression, and is just the beginning for Intel’s work in this space. Along with this announcement, Intel is releasing its 2018 Diversity & Inclusion report, highlighting progress made over the course of this journey and the current composition of its workforce.

“We are proud of our progress but not satisfied. We prioritize this as a business imperative to drive innovation and future growth. Diversity and inclusion cannot be treated as an add-on. It has to be integrated into everything we do and this is just the beginning. We need to make sure inclusion remains at the center. Every voice matters, and we need to listen and act to make change happen.”
– Barbara Whye, Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer and vice president of Human Resources for the Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group

Why It’s Important: A diverse workforce and inclusive culture are key to Intel’s evolution. Diverse teams with different perspectives, experiences and ideas are more creative and innovative, resulting in a collaborative and supportive environment. Intel will continue its ongoing commitment to advance diversity and inclusion, collaborate with industry partners on key learnings, and encourage a community of openness, belonging and inclusion. Reaching the goal is also significant given more than 85 percent of Intel’s workforce is in technical roles, making the goal more difficult to achieve.

The Start of Intel’s Journey: In January 2015, Intel set a goal to reach full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in the U.S. workforce by 2020. Intel committed $300 million to support this goal and the company’s broader goal of improving diversity and inclusion in the entire technology industry. As part of the company’s deep commitment to diversity and inclusion, Intel invests in programs that expand access to STEM education and opportunities in underserved populations, including pathway programs, grants and mentorship. Additionally, it has invested heavily in internal programs so employees can bring their full experiences and authentic selves to work.

What the Report Shows: Intel’s 2018 Annual Diversity & Inclusion report illustrates the progress of women and minorities across all levels of the company as company leaders strive to sustain a collaborative, supportive and inclusive work environment. Since setting the goal, the number of underrepresented minorities and women in Intel’s U.S. workforce has increased for the fourth consecutive year. Overall representation of underrepresented minorities at Intel in the U.S. is now at 14.6 percent.

Intel’s last report in March noted that the remaining gap to full representation was with African American employees. This has been successfully closed due to continuous efforts in hiring, retention and progression. In fact, African Americans had the highest overall underrepresented minority percentage point increase in the U.S. employee population and now make up 4.6 percent of employees overall.

How Intel Focuses on Retention: In 2016, Intel instituted a program called Warmline, a confidential employee hotline designed to help employees with career advancement and improve the overall employee experience. It has increasingly gained traction as a resource for employees, and as a result has also become a source of insight into creating a more inclusive environment. Since its inception, the Warmline has received more than 20,000 cases with a retention rate of 82 percent. It’s an example of Intel’s data-driven principles underpinning correlations between a more diverse and inclusive organization and improved morale.

Retention of women also continues to be priority at Intel. Women account for nearly 27 percent of Intel’s total U.S. employee base, with almost 24 percent of women in technical roles. The company offers several programs to support women through career progression, including “Pay It Forward,” a mentoring program scaled to support 6,000 female mid-level employees, and “Women at Intel Network,” the company’s largest employee resource group that supports more than 7,000 employees globally.

What’s Next: Intel’s work does not stop here. In 2019, Intel plans to offer its Warmline service globally, drive leadership parity and focus on women of color.

Data shine a light on the importance of focusing more acutely on the unique challenges women of color face. Intel is already taking steps to address this issue and recently joined industry partners as a founding member of the Reboot Representation Tech Coalition, an initiative spearheaded by Melinda Gates’ investment and incubation company, Pivotal Ventures. The coalition will align existing philanthropic donations and increase funding to double the number of women of color graduating with computing degrees in the U.S. by 2025.

More Context: For full details on the 2018 Diversity & Inclusion Report, visit Intel’s Global Diversity and Inclusion web page. To read more about diversity and inclusion at Intel, visit the Intel Diversity in Technology Initiative press kit.

About Intel

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), a leader in the semiconductor industry, is shaping the data-centric future with computing and communications technology that is the foundation of the world’s innovations. The company’s engineering expertise is helping address the world’s greatest challenges as well as helping secure, power and connect billions of devices and the infrastructure of the smart, connected world – from the cloud to the network to the edge and everything in between. Find more information about Intel at newsroom.intel.com and intel.com.

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