Towards a more diverse Color – Color

At Color we believe in the principle of health equity: the idea that every person deserves the same level of service and access to the tools, resources and information that help them achieve their optimal health. Reaching these goals means building a company that represents the various cultures and backgrounds of the clients we serve. We’ve made diversity and inclusion a key goal from day one, and last year Color was one of roughly 80 tech companies that answered President Obama’s call to join the Tech Inclusion Pledge.

Part of that pledge is public disclosure. Here’s where we stand:

• 54% of our employees are women, along with 40% of our executive team (Chief Medical Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, VP of Product & Design and Lab Director).
• Only 3% of our employees are underrepresented minorities (URM).
• Our engineering and product teams are 26% female, and 0% are URM. Our Science & Technology team is 45% female, 2% are URM.
• Roughly a third of Color’s individual investors are women, as are 78% of our advisors and collaborators, including renowned geneticist and professor Dr. Mary Claire King, the discoverer of the BRCA1 gene. Our Board is 25% female.
• 34% of our employees are immigrants and/or first generation Americans, including three of our four founders.
• Our ~100 employees speak 17 languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

In the first half of 2017, we spent roughly 60% of our recruiting efforts sourcing URM and female engineering candidates. To help us identify and reduce bias in our hiring process, we hosted an unconscious bias training session led by Paradigm. And Color employees made this cool video.

While we are proud of our efforts, we have a lot more work to do. Specifically, we need to do a much better job recruiting underrepresented minorities and increasing overall diversity in our engineering team. Going forward, we plan to hire at least 2 interns from bootcamps that focus on engineers from underrepresented backgrounds. We’re sourcing resumes blindly with Triplebyte to minimize bias. We also plan to ramp up our URM and women sourcing to 75%, host Girls Who Code at Color, and recruit more aggressively at historically black colleges and universities.

Lastly, while driving health equity is an external goal, ensuring pay equity is an internal goal. To that end, we’ll regularly analyze our compensation packages in order to ensure pay equity.

Diversity and inclusion are and will remain top priorities for Color, and we’re committed to being transparent about our progress and holding ourselves accountable. We’re open to your thoughts and suggestions. Better yet, if you share our passion and mission, join us.

Note: Here are are previous updates from 2015 and 2016.