Medium: The Diversity Report

2018 Edition

We believe that having diverse perspectives and voices within our workforce is vital for us to offer diverse perspectives and voices to our readers, and the only way to have meaningful diversity at work is to foster an inclusive environment. Diversity for us includes, but is not limited to, gender, ethnicity, race, culture, socio-economic background, religion, age, physical ability, veteran status, country of origin, primary language, sexuality, political preference, education, and family makeup.

The Data

Every year, we send an optional survey to our staff to gather demographic information and give employees a chance to voice whether they feel our workplace is diverse and inclusive. We sent the survey to staff hired up until November 13, 2018 and the responses are valid as of November 30, 2018. A few notes on the data:

• The survey is anonymous and optional for all employees. Contractors were not included in this survey. In order to capture some of the subgroups of the survey, we cross-referenced survey data with our internal HR data.
• We separate our statistics into tech — which includes engineering, product, and data science — and non-tech, which includes (but is not limited to) marketing, content, operations, human resources, and design. We do not separate the demographics for other functional groups because their small size precludes anonymity.
• Senior employees are defined as individuals who are in one of the top three levels of our six-tier internal leveling system.

Who We Are

As of November 13, 2018, we are comprised of 98 employees that identify mostly as introverts and ambiverts. We enjoy both outdoor and indoor activities, with a slight preference for staying indoors. Our current employees are based all over the US, with 75% of the company in San Francisco, 15% in New York and the rest working remotely. The largest team is engineering (46% of Medium) followed by Editorial (13%) and Product (11%).

Gender

The overall gender split for Medium is 39.6% (-0.6 percentage points from 2017) female and 60.4% male. For the tech roles, the split is 31.5% (-6.5pp from 2017) female and 68.5% male, while for non-tech roles, the ratio of female and male employees is even at 50% (+14pp for female held positions from 2017). In senior positions, we have 27.5% (+4.7pp from 2017) of the positions filled by female employees and the remaining 72.5% filled by male employees.

Race & Ethnicity

The current makeup of Medium is 63% of employees that identify as White. That’s an increase of +5pp from the previous year. There are also 24% of employees identifying as Asian, which represents an increase of +2pp from 2017. We have 9% of employees that identify as Black or African American and that’s a decrease of -2pp from last year. Other groups saw a marginal increase of +1–2pp from 2017.

We do not have any Black, African American, Hispanic, or Latinx employees at the senior level.

Age, LGBTQ+ & Origin

There are other areas of diversity that we measure:

• Most of our employees are between 26–30 years old, but there was a decrease of -8pp from the previous year. The company is trending older and now more than 50% of the employees are 31 years and older.
• 14% of our employees identify as LGBTQ+, a jump of +4.3pp from 2017.
• Most Medians were born in America but there’s a significant number (45%) of employees that are either immigrants or born of parents that are immigrants.

Inclusion

We asked employees who they felt should be better represented at Medium. Combining direct answers to this question with free-form comments, 61% of respondents expressed a desire for a more diverse leadership team. Other areas where people felt Medium lacks diverse representation include: race & ethnicity, age, and political views.

The free form comments also capture that as we continue to grow and become increasingly distributed as a workforce, we have an opportunity to ensure better parity around benefits and social events between remote worker and workers in our San Francisco office.