At Salesforce, Equality is a core value and we believe our higher purpose is to create a more equal world for all. A key part of this vision is to build a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone feels they can bring their full, authentic self to work. Research shows when leaders commit to workplace equality and advocate for their employees, their cultures change for the better. There is nothing more empowering than feeling that you are heard, valued, and truly belong at work.

We live in an era where businesses — and their leaders — can be powerful platforms and agents for social change. A great example of this is the CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion, the largest CEO-driven business commitment to advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace. I'm thrilled and proud that our CEO Marc Benioff — who has consistently advocated for business leaders to drive social change — join the pledge and continue to be a responsive leader of Equality. As we often say, we can not do it alone and will have to work together with our entire Ohana — employees, customers, partners, tech industry, and our peer leaders — to create a path towards Equality for All.

As part of the pledge, each company is sharing their own actions around diversity and inclusion to drive greater change in our industries. At Salesforce, we focus on the following strategies to drive Equality in our workplace:

1. Affinity Groups and Networks: Salesforce supports nine employee resource groups, called Ohana groups. These employee led networks build community for underrepresented groups and their allies, offer professional development, mentoring opportunities and empower employees to be effective equality leaders in their communities. Today, about one out of every three Salesforce employees participate in one or more Ohana Groups. These groups are critical to our culture and helping to attract, retain and advance diverse employees.
2. Gender Strategies: As a company, we continuously assess compensation across gender and race to ensure pay equity for our employees. To date, we've completed two pay assessments, and spent approximately $6 million to address statistically significant differences in pay. At Salesforce, we strive to be a place where everyone can bring their full, authentic self to work and succeed (watch the film: "Proudly Me"). In the U.S., we've expanded options for employee voluntary self-identification (self I.D.). In addition to the more common self I.D. fields (e.g. marital status, race/ethnicity, abilities, military service) we also include sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender pronouns.
3. Education and Training: We help employees recognize unconscious bias at work and limit its impact on employee performance as well as recruiting through education and training tools. We created a global in-person workshop called Cultivating Equality. We also have a public-facing online learning platform, called Trailhead, featuring modules on equality (e.g. unconscious bias).

We’re excited to share these best practices with other dedicated CEOs, and hear more about their learnings. Together, we can be, as Congressman John Lewis says, “the headlights, not taillights” on the path to Equality. Thank you, Marc, for being a headlight and leading the way with this important pledge.