Name: How Twitter and Major League Baseball are making a push for diversity and inclusion
Uploaded: 2021-02-24
Duration: 4 min 35 s
Description: Twitter’s Jennifer Christie and MLB’s Michele Meyer-Shipp explain.

Twitter’s Jennifer Christie and MLB’s Michele Meyer-Shipp explain.

How Twitter and Major League Baseball are making a push for diversity and inclusion 

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Jennifer Christie and Michele Meyer-Shipp explain.

Twitter and Major League Baseball make a push for diversity

How Twitter and Major League Baseball are making a push for diversity and inclusion

Jennifer. I'd love to start with Twitter, which, like many tech companies, has struggled to diversify its leadership and its technical ranks, but which has made some big, ambitious promises for to increase its workforce diversity by 2025. And, uh, and last week you committed to having 25% of leadership roles being held by women are underrepresented minorities. What? What changes have you made so far to reach these goals? And what sort of heavy lifting or names? Yes, thank you and hi, everybody. It's great to be here. I will say that we benefited from the fact that we started, um, really refreshing our approach to diversity and inclusion a few years ago. So we were already on a path laying foundations and working on how we build trust and accountability, uh, and and provide more transparency around our initiatives and our efforts to our employees who we call tweets. And so, at the beginning of last year, so well before we realized what 2020 would hold for us, we announced some pretty aggressive workforce representation goals to hit by 2025. And so that meant that by 2025 we wanted at least half of our workforce globally to be women. And we wanted at least a quarter of our workforce in the United States to be underrepresented minorities with black employees comprising at least 10% of our workforce. It's a very aggressive goals. We had made a lot of progress that those were aggressive goals to set. And then, as you know, Maria, we've just announced as well about those leadership goals that we have. And, you know, I think that leadership is definitely an area that we're focused on, and a few things that we're doing to try to address that one is that for the last few years, very much tracking with our efforts on inclusion and diversity, we've been decentralizing our workforce. We recognize that we were really focused on hiring kind of in one location, really in California, and it limited our ability to tap into much broader, uh, more diverse, frankly, talent pools of tech talent that are really across the globe. Michelle you joined Major League Baseball in October. In November, Kim Jong made headlines as the first woman to be hired as the general manager of a major league baseball team, but We've also seen headlines recently about, um, sexual harassment from the now fired just met general manager, um, Seattle Mariners CEO, resigning this week after, uh, bigoted comments. So how has that all affected your job and what you want to focus on at really baseball? So, you know, I did definitely indeed, coming at an interesting time. I mean, I think one of the things I'll point out that, you know, Twila just mentioned, you know, for me stepping in, you know, we were in the middle of, uh, being the first professional lead in the midst of trying to pull off a season and a pandemic, not in and of itself. The health and safety of our employees was our primary focus. Um, and obviously, we also I also stepped in at the time when we were going through all of the upheaval around racial justice and equity. Um, so that was something I had to step into right away. Um, the good thing for me and what I was very optimistic about was the fact that we've our players are owners are our teams had already started down the right path and engaging in a meaningful dialogue about diversity equity and inclusion and about racial equity. Um, so this was not a situation where I had to come in and troubleshoot they were already on it. Our players alliance was formed and launched, and some really great actions were underway, um, to address and deal with these issues. And I'd add that, you know, this wasn't something that you know, the events of the summer. We're not, um it wasn't a wake up call for us, because actually, amazing baseball has been doing a lot prior to me coming in to address issues of racial justice across baseball, you know, on issues around, you know, the news in the recent weeks around sexual harassment claims and conduct. You know, that is not becoming those claims predate me, and they actually go back a couple of years. Um, so the good news is, you know, baseball has really strong policies and practices in place around, you know, the workforce in the workplace that we're trying to drive, which is one of inclusion and belonging and psychological safety