Equity

How We Can All Help Create Equal Access to Opportunity

Our vision is to create economic opportunity, and we are working hard to help ensure equal access to the opportunity we create and to help drive more equitable outcomes for all members of the global workforce.

Deepening our understanding of who is using our products is an important step on this journey. When we can measure outcomes across gender, race, ethnicity, and disabilities, we will be able to see whether or not opportunities are equitable on our platform, and if not work to close any equity gaps. 

Starting today, members in the U.S. will begin to see prompts to self-identify from their LinkedIn profile. We've worked with many of our community of partners and our members to develop and get feedback on our approach. This builds on our work over the last two years, with more than 4 million LinkedIn members already choosing to self-identify by sharing their demographic information with us. When you choose to share your demographic information, it will not be visible on your profile or used to identify you to other members, recruiters, or companies without your explicit consent. You can also change, edit and remove this information in your Settings at any time.

Self ID

This demographic information will allow us to identify, understand, and drive toward equitable outcomes for everyone using our platform. We plan to use this information to:  

  • Review our products for any biases and introduce new product features that increase the value of the platform for people in underrepresented groups and improve opportunity for entire communities. One of the ways we already do this is with Project Every Member, an open-source project that allows us to measure and reduce inequality and avoid unintended consequences such as reinforcing social inequalities. 

  • Help hiring managers and recruiters in their efforts to recruit more diverse teams. For example, by providing actionable insights on all phases of the hiring process to recruiters and hiring managers, we can help companies create more diverse and inclusive hiring practices that welcome all qualified candidates from every background. One way we do this today is by showing recruiters how their InMail messages to potential candidates perform by acceptance rates by gender.

  • Deliver insights on global workforce trends to measure and improve equality. This includes providing insights in our monthly LinkedIn Workforce Report Labor market report and sharing insights on what actions members can take for greater equality of opportunity.

These efforts build on our work to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. To hear more about how we’re investing in our platform to help pursue and achieve our commitment to diversity and inclusion read this post from our CEO post here.