As a global leader, we know our differences can be our greatest strength – but just saying so isn’t enough. Instead, we must ensure that each individual has fair and equal opportunity for career development and advancement, and that respect for diverse backgrounds and perspectives is baked into our company’s culture at every level – from strategy and policy down to the smallest everyday interactions.

That’s how we build a company with the broad-based strengths to thrive in the decades to come. It’s how we attract and retain the best people and build winning teams that are able to share their best thinking and collaborate in an environment of mutual regard. Enabling all of our people to do their best work drives innovation and performance, allowing us to fulfill our mission to make possible a better future. In 2019, we made significant strides in our journey toward a Culture of Inclusion (COI), including:

  • Expanding gender diversity on our Board to 30% female membership
  • Increasing women’s employee representation in the U.S. and globally
  • Increasing U.S. underrepresented minority representation
  • Establishing a team fully dedicated to COI
  • Establishing a Diversity Strategy and Culture of Inclusion Framework
  • Broadening inclusion-focused questions in our employee survey and continuing to measure engagement
  • Assessing progress against the Global Diversity & Inclusion Benchmark (GDIB)

To fully actualize our Culture of Inclusion vision, we are building on the best of who we are today while embracing a new, focused, and intentional path forward. Diversity and inclusion must be embedded in everything we do, to help us offer a workplace and culture of respect and inclusion, where everyone is engaged and inspired to do their best work. That’s vital for our people and our ability to deliver value-creating innovation to our customers and shareholders. To accelerate progress toward a Culture of Inclusion, we are:

  • Engaging leaders as change champions, making the mission of inclusion personal for them, ensuring they understand the challenges before crafting solutions, and defining inclusion barriers and key metrics for leading change.
  • Eliminating systemic barriers to inclusion by leveraging data to develop key action strategies and monitor success, and engaging and empowering Inclusion Change teams to break down walls.
  • Operationalizing inclusion in all we do, including leveraging best practices; ensuring that our talent practices are inclusive; and tracking progress through employee representation data, employee engagement scores, and other qualitative and quantitative metrics.

We also know that transparency is key to progress and will continue building on efforts began in 2018 with our first report on global gender and U.S. race and ethnicity in our workforce. In 2019, we disclosed our 2016–2018 EEO-1 reports and diversity data at three levels: executives, managers, and professionals. The data showed slight gains for Asian, women, Hispanic/Latino, Black/African-American, Native American/Alaskan, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander groups.

We’re proud of this alignment and dedication to Applied Material’s vision to Make Possible a Better Future, and we invite you to read more about our journey here.