Diversity, inclusion, and belonging at GitHub 2022
Our purpose is to enable software developers across the globe to make the world a better place. With 90+ million developers and 1+ billion annual contributions, we strive to make inclusion in the tech industry the norm. Our goal is to continue building a world where diverse contributions are accepted and all voices are heard.
We celebrate our thriving identities
GitHub is dedicated to building a community that reflects our world. To that end, our Communities of Belonging are key to building that culture of inclusion. These communities, sponsored by leadership, provide safe spaces where Hubbers can learn from one another, while sharing a broad set of experiences and passions. This year, we welcomed several emerging affinity groups—a sign of the plurality celebrated every day at GitHub. To learn more, visit our Communities of Belonging page.
Git it together
We commissioned artist I AM SOTERIA to create and perform a spoken word piece all about the impact and legacy of the Blacktocats.
We help make the open source community more inclusive
We introduced All In, a community dedicated to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within open source through the pillars of access, community, equity, and data. We approached it the ‘open source way’—openly, transparently, and in collaboration with corporate partners, industry leaders, researchers, and foundations across the open source ecosystem.
During the All In for students pilot, we reached:
- 1,000+ community members
- 17 founding partners
- 7 partnering education institutions
- Our first student cohort of 30 students, primarily from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). 100% of them committed to internships. We’re targeting 300+ students next year
- 7,000+ open source community members were surveyed
This year, we’re looking forward to expanding All In for students to provide an on-ramp for even more new contributors to open source. We’re also excited to launch All In for Maintainers—to equip community leaders with the resources, training, and tools they need to create a culture of inclusion within their communities. We invite you to join us as we open source diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We strive for progress when building inclusive solutions
Our mission to support the 90M+ developers on GitHub means understanding and adapting our platform to their needs. Here are some examples of how we’re making GitHub more accessible:
- We launched Copilot, the groundbreaking tool that turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions across dozens of languages and increases accessibility. Users with motor disabilities whose ability to type is reduced can now write multiple lines of code in a single action—resulting in boosted productivity.
- We offer a variety of themes that use different color palettes to improve the reading experience for our colorblind and low vision customers.
- Users who prefer not to see moving gifs, due to motion being distracting or causing a negative sensory experience, now have the option to prevent animated images from automatically playing.
We honor diverse contributions
Powered by and for GitHub’s community, The ReadME Project continues to be our platform for knowledge sharing, inspiration, and thought provoking content. While software is the hero of our stories, it’s the people—representing a diverse range of expertise and backgrounds—that are key to building a more inclusive community. This past year, the platform promoted experts in software development who also strive to improve the entry point, culture, and interpersonal relationships built through open source collaboration. This includes Tatiana Mac, who maintains an open source dictionary to help everyone understand identities and the lived experiences of underrepresented people in technology; Kara Carrell, president of Write/Speak/Code who focuses on writing, speaking, thought leadership, and tech development through open source contribution; and Adewale “Ace” Abati whose organization, Made-in-Nigeria, promotes a thriving ecosystem of tools and open source software projects built by Nigerian developers to help local communities train developers.
We highlight our stars
Out of millions of developers on GitHub, there are a select few who go above and beyond in helping others in the developer space. The GitHub Stars program recognizes and lifts up these Stars who inspire and educate our communities. This year, we increased our Stars and added representation from 35 more countries, including Singapore, Croatia, Czechia, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Romania, Slovenia, and Vietnam. Our Stars represent a wide variety of lived experiences and roles ranging from CXOs, data scientists, engineers, OSS maintainers, SREs, developer advocates, and content creators. Some role models in this amazing group are Gina Häußge from Germany, Nguyễn Nhật Hoàng from Vietnam, Monica Powell from the United States, and Ruth Ikegah from Nigeria. They all make GitHub the highly inclusive platform that it is today, and we celebrate their ability to nurture the developer community in all its diversity.
We fight for developers
Policy shapes not only what opportunities developers have, but the very opportunity to be a developer. We advocate that policy should enable all developers to do their best work, which is why equal opportunity is one of three pillars that drives all of our policy advocacy. The past year, has shown an increase in threats to the interconnected global software community—ranging from regional Internet shutdowns to targeted sanctions. We’ve continued to advocate for protecting access by: following up on our successful campaign for a license to serve users in Iran, advocating for policy that fosters global collaboration, and collaborating with others advocating for equal access, like at IGF and RightsCon.
We also appreciate that developers need to be safe in their communities to reach their potential, and have proudly joined industry coalitions advocating to protect human rights, most recently including LGBTQ+ workplace rights and marriage equality.
More recently, we made our voice clear regarding the powerful role developers have in promoting freedom of expression and transparency, in our Internet Freedom and Global Availability in Iran blog.
We practice empathy
In our pledge to create a more inclusive world, we continued raising funds for equity causes, creating awareness of disparity, and providing humanitarian aid. In the last year, our employees supported nearly 2,200 nonprofit organizations around the world, contributed over $5.5 million USD, donated 8,550+ volunteer hours to 220+ causes, including:
NICE, a school in Hyderabad, India dedicated to improving literacy
Sogorea Te Land Trust focused on restoring sacred relationships with ancestral lands
Razom to support displaced families from Ukraine
Save the Children to help kids from affected areas, ranging from Afghanistan to local states like Kentucky.
We actively support social equality
Recognizing that our world requires intentional action to solve disparities, we started Tech for Social Good, a portfolio of programs from the GitHub Social Impact team that focuses on open source capacity building in the social sector. Recently, Tech for Social Good supported the World Health Organization to create the first ever Open Source Programme Office (OSPO) in the United Nations system. Tech for Social Good also runs an open source community called the MERL Center, which has engaged members in 15+ countries in five continents.
The team launched a research project on open source software developers in four low- and middle-income countries: Kenya, Egypt, India, and Mexico to better understand the developer communities and their priorities. The research explored language, culture, education, and economic differences in the four countries.
We create tech spaces to celebrate cultural diversity
GitHub is always looking for ways to positively influence representation in tech. OctogatosConf22 and GitHub Presente are great examples of our commitment to this goal. This year, GitHub Presente hosted more than 30 events for Latinx technologists, with participation from seven countries in Central and South America.
OctogatosConf22, our annual conference celebrating Latinx culture in tech, featured interactive talks live-streamed in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, with live translation. Topics included software development, security, technical project management, community, open source, professional development, and best practices. Our hope is to bring together a wide community to celebrate culture and heritage.
These are some examples of how we continue working hard to ensure that Latinx feel welcome and included in the GitHub community.
We volunteer to educate and preserve cultural heritage
Through skills-based volunteering, we match Hubbers with partner social sector organizations to help solve their strategic and technical problems through short term projects. Employees can use their knowledge of coding languages, like JavaScript or Python, and their experience with GitHub Actions or documentation to help associations who need it most.
Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (CIELO) is an Indigenous, women-led non-profit organization that works jointly with Indigenous communities residing in Los Angeles, California to fight for social justice through a cultural lens. In association with CIELO, Hubbers are helping build a Lotería game for children to learn and preserve the endangered indigenous Zapotec language.
Hubbers also partnered with Mobile Pathways, a non profit that uses mobile technology to bridge the gap between vulnerable immigrants and legal advocates and services, to provide expertise on data analysis and visualization. This analysis culminated in an interactive map that allows the user to see where beneficiaries are located and additional information about that data point, such as the gender and age of the recipient. The interactive map has helped Mobile Pathways identify how their current impact is distributed in California and other places where more resources are needed.
Take a look at the case study here!
We hack to advocate for marginalized communities
As one of the biggest stewards of open source, we want to enable 90+ million developers to ship software that makes our world better to the communities that need it most.
Through ProgramEquity, Communities of Belonging explored the ways that nonprofits and public sector organizations can also leverage open source as a larger volunteer ecosystem to accelerate their social impact. ProgramEquity helped us host a series of skills-based hackathons during Black History month and Earth Day for Hubbers, as we enabled 40 advocacy groups to accelerate their impact on civic rights, sustainability, and climate action.
In a unique combination of coding and impact, 132 Hubbers across eight departments learned from 40 advocacy groups and land stewardship movements while they hacked away and raised over $15,000 USD! This unique community-powered hackathon was spearheaded by our Global Indigenous community Octo7 in cross collaboration with Blacktocats, Octogatos, OctoAsians, and Octoqueer communities.
- Leveraged by Climate Can’t Wait, one of the largest climate packages focused on reducing emissions, increasing biodiversity, generating clean jobs, and returning land stewardship to Lenape tribes.
- A roadmap to serve all 544 federally recognized and unrecognized Native tribes across Turtle Island (United States) in collaboration with Native Land Digital.
We invest in an inclusive future
The composition of our society is rapidly changing in many countries. In the US, according to census data, the generation entering college this year will see US race and ethnic minorities in their highest representation ever. These demographic changes call for an intentional approach from companies and institutions to make space for that talent to occupy top levels of leadership. This year, we took an important step towards that goal by proactively investing in the professional development of top diverse talent (career accelerators). Honoring learning preferences, options were given to nominees to choose from programs that ranged from learning in a highly interactive experience with peers, to learning in private settings at their own pace. This allowed for a tailored experience, with the ultimate goal to propel role models from all backgrounds higher into the organization.
It has been another exciting year of growth, and we’re committed to continuing this intentional approach to represent the global developer community. Because GitHub is the home for all developers—where people with different backgrounds and experiences can thrive.
GitHub by the numbers
As the world continued to present social, economic, climate and health challenges, we continued our mission to drive human progress.
Growth
For the second year in a row, our global employee population grew significantly, increasing by +37%. We hired 1,178 new Hubbers in FY22, which was a hiring growth rate of 32.8%, making 41.9% of our GitHub population new in FY22. This is a tremendous statement about how the open source community continues to thrive.
As GitHub continued to expand, so did our minority demographics. As a group, our US race and ethnic minorities increased by +41.4%.
The number of Black employee representation grew by +60.3%, outpacing the US population growth. Our Latinx population by +25.5% and our US Multiracial employee population increased by +67.3%.
Annual growth rate, FY21–FY22
Annual growth rate, FY21–FY22
Annual growth rate, FY21–FY22
Annual growth rate, FY21–FY22
Annual growth rate, FY21–FY22
Gender (Global) *1
While the GitHub population grew by +37% year over year, the representation of women increased by +42.2%.
Our overall representation of women reached 30.7%, an increase of more than one full percentage point from the prior year. At the technical level, representation of women increased by +2.3 percentage points to 24.5%. Women represented 33.4% of management positions, above their representation and strengthening the leadership pipeline. Additionally, women made up 33.4% of the new-hire population.
Male 69.3%
Female 30.7%
Male 75.5%
Female 24.5%
Male 66.6%
Female 33.4%
Male 70.4%
Female 29.6%
Male 77.9%
Female 22.1%
Male 68.7%
Female 31.8%
Race and ethnic minorities (US)*2
Since our last report, our Black, Asian, and Multiracial populations all saw improvements in representation.
Our Black Hubber population, in particular, more than doubled (from FY20 to FY22), and had an annual growth rate in FY22 of +60.3%, which was higher than that of GitHub US.
Other populations had similar improvements: the number of Asian and Multiracial US Hubbers nearly doubled in the past two years. And we saw Black women also increase their representation.
Mirroring the last census results in the US, we saw that the category of multiracial Hubbers grew the most—a sign of how our overall demographics are changing toward a more racially converging society.
While these achievements are a reason to pause and reflect on our progress, we acknowledge there is room to grow—and we have exciting new initiatives in plan to do so.
White 66.1%
Asian 15.6%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.0%
African-American/Black 6.4%
Multiracial 4.7%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.1%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.1%
White 68.0%
Asian 15.6%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.2%
African-American/Black 5.2%
Multiracial 3.8%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.1%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.1%
White 69.4%
Asian 15.0%
Hispanic/Latinx 5.1%
African-American/Black 5.1%
Multiracial 5.1%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.0%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.3%
White 58.8%
Asian 21.1%
Hispanic/Latinx 5.8%
African-American/Black 7.6%
Multiracial 6.4%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.3%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.2%
White 67.3%
Asian 15.5%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.6%
African-American/Black 5.4%
Multiracial 3.8%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.4%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 70.4%
Asian 14.8%
Hispanic/Latinx 7.9%
African-American/Black 4.2%
Multiracial 2.2%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.5%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 72.6%
Asian 15.3%
Hispanic/Latinx 5.5%
African-American/Black 3.3%
Multiracial 3.3%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.0%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
White 57.8%
Asian 22.0%
Hispanic/Latinx 6.4%
African-American/Black 6.8%
Multiracial 6.4%
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.6%
American Indian/Alaska Native 0.0%
Senior Leadership Roles *3
Women now represent 23.6% of GitHub’s senior leaders*3, growing as a community by +44.3% year over year. This improvement can also be seen in the representation of our racial and ethnic minorities in the US, including Black and Multiracial. This is a testament to our intentional efforts to make our leadership more inclusive, and provide diverse role models to the future generations in our upper ranks.
It has been another exciting year of growth, and we’re committed to continuing this intentional approach to represent the global developer community. Because GitHub is the home for all developers—where people with different backgrounds and experiences can thrive.
This data reflects the state of diversity at GitHub as of June 30, 2022, unless otherwise noted.
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The gender data above includes employees who have self-identified as a man or a woman. Those who did not identify as either, or willingly opted to not self-disclose, are not counted in either group (man or women), nor in the denominator. We honor their choice not to be restricted by a binary system. The representation of women overall, if those who do not identify as women or men were added to the denominator, is 30.5%. ↩
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We are aware that the standard reporting categories mandated by the U.S. federal government don’t currently support the diverse range of identities celebrated and represented among Hubbers. We are hopeful this will change in the future. ↩
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The phrase “senior leaders” represents employees who fall into compensation grades 10 and 11, which is the equivalent to a Director and Senior Director-level roles. ↩
We reserve the right to supplement data in this report with additional information throughout the year to keep it updated and relevant. Historical numbers may differ slightly due to rounding and refinements in methodology year over year.
Technical roles: Hubbers who have a technical job profile / compensation grade, as identified in our Human Resources Information System.