CEO Rob Bearden vowed to take deliberate and decisive action to make Cloudera a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place to work and to have Cloudera take an active role in promoting those attributes in the tech industry and communities.
Chief Diversity Officer (CDO), Sarah Shin, shares the company's progress so far.
Creating an equality committee and hiring a Chief Diversity Officer
Cloudera's leadership team formed an equality committee dedicated to DE&I efforts. "Stacked with superstars from across the company, the team hit the ground running with quick impact and long term impact ideas, as represented by the program update above," explains Sarah.
Sarah [pictured above] was promoted from her role as Head of Diversity, Inclusion & Learning to fill the newly created CDO position. From there, she was enabled to build a team that would help take Cloudera's efforts to the next level.
Holding itself accountable via transparent data
Cloudera also promised to reveal its diversity and inclusion numbers to hold itself accountable. "While we continue to review our analytics, we’ve begun sharing our data on a public-facing DE&I web page, and will share comprehensive data on an annual basis," says Sarah.
Cloudera's team is working with leaders and team members across the business to help narrow representation gaps. "Are we where we want to be yet? No, but we’re working hard to get there," she insists.
Enacting change in the local communities
To enact real change outside of Cloudera, Cloudera worked with the Cloudera Foundation, which has since merged with the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, to create a Data4Change Accelerator program. It’s a fixed-term, nonprofit data exploration and analysis platform managed by Cloudera data engineers and operated on the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Public Cloud.
It functions as an analytics sandbox that can handle large, complex datasets. The first cohort of five nonprofits also received $75,000 supplementary grants to cover expenses associated with running the nonprofit’s data exploration, including cloud-related costs.
Another initiative Cloudera's leadership discussed implementing was creating a Center of Excellence (CoE) incubator with the goal of sponsoring an educational workspace for underrepresented high school minorities.
Cloudera has started by partnering with the Boys & Girls Club of America in Middle Tennessee and Peninsula chapters to provide STEM, finance, marketing, professional development, and other relevant training and development opportunities. This work will help level the playing field for underserved high schoolers who will compete for internships and other academic pursuits.
Cloudera also created a $10,000 annual scholarship budget and is now in the process of creating professional internships for girls and underrepresented minority youth.
Launching learning and developing initiatives
The company has also launched several DE&I learning and development initiatives, including allyship training for the entire company, an inclusive leadership program for the executive team and Cloudera managers, and Bias Busters manager training.
Plus, to build a more diverse pipeline for leadership positions, Cloudera piloted a sponsorship program that paired 19 underrepresented minorities and women who work at Cloudera with executive sponsors and provided them with six months of executive coaching.
"The results of this pilot were overwhelmingly positive, for both the executives and their paired proteges, leading us to start another round of the program when it ended. Participants reported an increase in career development planning, desire to continue careers at Cloudera, and positive sentiment around inclusion and belonging," says Sarah.
Reviewing and addressing wage gaps
Finally, Cloudera partnered with AON to perform a pay equity study and are in the final stages of aggregating the data from the regression analysis to share with the executive team. From there, the company will determine next steps and correct pay discrepancies.
"When I look back at all we’ve accomplished...I’m proud. Yet I know there is much work to do to address the diversity issues prevalent in our industry. I remain hopeful and excited about the potential to make it—and Cloudera—more welcoming, fair, open, and accepting," concludes Sarah.
Work for a company driving diversity and inclusion
For Cloudera, actions speak louder than words, which is why it has made such positive progress in its vision of a more inclusive, equitable and diverse workplace.
With this rapid growth, now is an exciting time to join Cloudera and forge a career at the company.
Find out more
Disclosure: Where Women Work researches and publishes insightful evidence about how its paid member organizations support women's equality.