Social Responsibility

Our progress addressing racial equity Intuit from the inside out

Supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) remains critical given the extraordinary challenges we’ve been facing as a society. From public displays of racism to the inequalities exacerbated by the global pandemic, systemic racism continues to exist. While DEI has been a core focus for Intuit since our founding, we’ve publicly committed to accelerate our efforts

Written by Intuit Blog team
Published Jun 16, 2022
5 min read

Diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and opinions help us grow and innovate, making DEI critical to the success of our business. The more diverse we are, the better we can reflect our more than 100 million customers, build empathy and create products and services that solve their unique problems. From employee representation, to ensuring our products are fair and inclusive, to our impact on the communities around us, DEI is fundamental to our success.

Ending systemic racism is complex, and we will continue to do our part to make a difference. Two years ago, we came together as a company to create Intuit’s Racial Equity Advancement Leadership (REAL) team which is responsible for developing a long-term plan to address racial equity at Intuit.

Our work to fight for a more equal world will never be complete, but here’s some of the progress we’ve made:

Supporting our Black colleagues and the Black community

More than two years ago, we appointed Intuit’s first-ever racial equity director, to create a lasting roadmap for bringing equity to the Black community. We’ve also publicly called for corporations to pay fairly and give equal opportunities to Black people, and given grants to support Black business owners.

In 2021, the U.S. officially recognized Juneteenth as a federal holiday. In honor of Juneteenth, we’ll observe this holiday on Monday, June 20, 2022, to reflect, educate ourselves, and participate in civic action as we strive for a more equitable world. As the longest-standing holiday to honor the emancipation of enslaved Black Americans, and a day of reflection and action, globally, Juneteenth is recognized to honor the culture and achievements of Black Americans and the end of slavery.

Increasing underrepresented minority talent recruiting and representation

We’ve expanded our efforts to attract diverse talent, working with new partners to help us strengthen our pipeline of underrepresented talent. This includes working with many professional Black associations, such as Afro Tech, Black Professionals in Tech Network, NextPlay, Black Women Talk Tech, and several others. We also have several partnerships in place with historically Black colleges or universities for talent to launch their careers with Intuit.

Beyond the pipeline, once a job candidate has identified Intuit as a company to explore, we’re making sure the interview experience reflects our commitment to racial equity. We’re continuing to increase the number of underrepresented employees who are certified to serve as neutral and objective members, or assessors, of interview teams. Our Black employees represent 40% of the underrepresented assessor community. We train and certify all assessors to make sure we have a consistent and fair hiring process.

Creating employee training and development resources

We’ve continued to create more opportunities to build employees’ skills and capabilities through training, developing an anti-racism education resource center, and providing resources to help educate employees at all levels of the organization. To date, more than 1,000 Intuit leaders have completed our racial equity training.

Since launching our anti-racist language principles, not only have we rolled out training to our employees, but these guidelines have driven over 800 improvements to potentially non-inclusive language in products, training materials, marketing, and customer service resources.

Developing inclusive practices and policies

We’re building a regular practice of re-evaluating our employee processes and policies to identify and prevent biases. For example, we’ve updated our processes for how employees are promoted and how performance is measured and rewarded. In our performance management process, we’ve built training materials and reminders to identify and prevent bias. We’ve also built consistent procedures to review diversity data trends before the process kicks off, during, and at the end. This helps us make sure our employees are being evaluated fairly.

Supporting our diverse customers and communities

As we celebrate the diversity of our customers, we also continue to find ways to shine a light on them. Our Virtual Prosperity Pop-Ups are held monthly for our employees around the world. They feature diverse small business owners and help us understand their unique stories and challenges, along with an opportunity for our employees to shop with and further support our small business customers.

We know that many of the communities we serve have limited access to educational programs and resources that prepare them for the future job market and contribute to their financial success. We want to level the playing field to better prepare people and students in these underserved communities for the job market through our job readiness program. We bring real-world tools into classrooms to help students develop personal finance skills and an entrepreneurial mindset. With this in mind, we expanded our Prosperity Hub School District program for school districts that are most in need to develop the next generation of students and teachers. The program now includes 21 school districts across nine countries with a combined enrollment of more than 1.6 million students. Each district was selected based on two key criteria: economic need and diversity of the student body. Nearly 80 percent of students in these districts identify as being from underrepresented groups.

Our commitment to driving greater societal transformation

While we’re making progress, we’ll continue to do more as we not only create long-term plans to address racial equity at Intuit, but advocate for ways that we can come together with our employees, customers, and communities to create a more equal world for all.