Diversity at Redfin in 2020

Each February, Redfin reports on the diversity of our employees in the prior year, and the results from our initiatives to make Redfin a better place for people of all colors and creeds to work. The results from 2020 are encouraging, with the percentage of employees who are people of color increasing from 31% to 33%.

Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among All Redfin Employees

The table does not include 2020 data from the U.S. Census, which usually doesn’t become available until March. We use the term “Latinx” in this report, though the U.S. Census also uses the term “Hispanic.”

More Black and Latinx Employees

The percentage of Redfin employees who are Black increased from 7.50% in 2019 to 8.49%, though we round both numbers in the table above to 8%. The percentage of employees who are Latinx had the biggest gain, increasing from 8.45% in 2019 to 10.02% in 2020.

Slating Works

In 2020, we required the slate of candidates interviewing for many roles to include at least one diverse candidate. From when we started hiring aggressively in October 2020 through January 2021, 41% of field roles were slated, as were 90% of management roles; exceptions had to be approved by a senior exec. Jobs took longer to fill, at a time when Redfin was turning away customers because we couldn’t hire fast enough. But in that extra time, we often found a diverse candidate who would’ve otherwise been overlooked.

First, Diversify Your Recruiting Team

What may have made an even bigger difference was the diversity of our recruiting team. From June 1 to December 31, 2020, our recruiting team increased from 19 to 31, and the percentage of Black and Latinx recruiters increased from 15% to 23%; 47% of our recruiters are now people of color. Their personal networks, and their own Redfin experience, make our recruiters formidable advocates for hiring people of color.

The Biggest Diversity Gains in Highly Paid Technical Roles

Our technical departments were where we made the most diversity progress, with the proportion of Black employees more than doubling in one year. Technical departments include software engineering, site operations, quality assurance, product management and product design.

Sourcing Candidates from Alternative Backgrounds, Setting Them Up to Succeed

When hiring product managers and product designers, we focused all of our sourcing efforts on finding diverse candidates, significantly improving the diversity of our overall applicant pool. What made a difference in engineering was previous years’ investment in documentation and training, which let us hire more people in 2020 who don’t have traditional computer-science backgrounds; the engineering team also opened roles early to candidates from non-traditional sources.

Hiring People Outside Seattle and San Francisco Makes a Big Difference

The opening of our Frisco, Texas office for technical roles in 2018 has kept paying off, with 29% of that office’s 2020 technical hires being Black or Latinx. As we hire more outside of Seattle and San Francisco, in Frisco or telecommuting, we hope to build on that momentum. When we hear about all the California companies still opening engineering offices in Seattle, we want to tell them about the diversity benefits of opening a Georgia or Texas office instead.

More Managers of Color

Perhaps the most encouraging diversity trend at Redfin is the sharp increase in people of color in management roles, driven by across-the-board gains among Black, Latinx and Asian employees. Representation doesn’t matter much if employees aren’t rising to positions of power, but we now have both Black and Asian employees at executive and board levels.

Racial and Ethnic Diversity Among Redfin Managers

Latinx Employees Underrepresented in Management

We still have plenty of work to do, especially in increasing the Latinx employees in management, at least in proportion to their overall numbers at Redfin if not in North America. We want to create better training and apprentice programs in 2021, especially for developing real estate agents or lenders into marketers, financiers or software designers. Our first step has been to set up mentorships between board members and employees we hope to develop into senior execs.

Attrition Is Still 10% Higher for People of Color

Our most alarming diversity problem is that attrition rates are still 10% higher for Redfin’s people of color than for white employees. Some of this is because we need to do more to make Redfin a welcoming place for someone who may be the only Black or Latinx person on a team. We also want to invest more in what we call the infrastructure of fairness. For example, promotion criteria and salary ranges are well-defined for most departments, with reporting that highlights patterns of bias in pay, promotions and equity grants. But because of changes in the human-resources department, a few departments still don’t tell employees the salary range for people at their level, and for people at the next level up. We’ll address that in 2021; other departments have already completed this work.

Diversity Changes the Most at Times of Great Stress, When You’re Least Likely to Notice It

What I’ve learned from the past year is that you have to pay the most attention to diversity at the times when it feels that you can least afford to do so: when your company is in crisis and has to reduce costs, or when your company is growing so fast you could scream. Those are the moments when people make decisions on instinct, surfacing primordial biases; these are also the moments when you hire, fire and promote people in bulk, increasing or decreasing diversity more in three months than you will in three years.

Redfin is 60% Women, 50% at Management Levels

Women’s representation also increased across the board at Redfin in 2020. Our field employees are more likely to be women than men, including at manager levels. The proportion of women in our tech group is much lower at 36%, but this still compares well to technical staff at Microsoft, where the tech group is 23% women, or Google and Facebook, where tech is 24% women. Our gender diversity gives us a big recruiting advantage against these companies; when a woman engineer interviews here, we feel like we have a good shot at hiring her and seeing her thrive.

Representation of Women at Redfin

This data doesn’t include the number of people at Redfin who are non-binary, just because, until 2020, our employee database tracked only women and men. As more employees make use of this new designation, we’ll have more to report in next year’s diversity report.

We Need More Women in Management

Though we’ve generally prioritized racial diversity ahead of gender diversity over the past years, gender fairness took on a special meaning in 2020, when schools and daycares were often closed; due to sexism at home, women were often expected to carry the child-care load, limiting their capacity to take on new responsibilities at work. We were glad to see the proportion of women in management at Redfin increase to 50%, but the truest measure of fairness would be to see the same proportion of women in management as at the company overall. We’ll keep working on that, in 2021 and beyond.