Diversity and our business

At Red Hat, we believe the more diverse we are, the better we can innovate, serve our customers, and contribute to the open source communities in which we participate. Research shows that organizations with more diversity—gender, racial, ethnic, and global—benefit in many ways. From more innovative products and services to a better understanding of customers and a stronger mix of leadership skills, diversity helps us widen our aperture and think about the world in new ways.

In the technology industry, diversity isn't just a “nice to have.” Diversity creates a competitive advantage. Every day, customers look to Red Hat for innovative enterprise infrastructure technologies that solve their business problems and help them better serve their own customers. We've been successful in large part because of our unique, community-powered development model, which opens our software to good ideas from anywhere and allows the best ideas to win. Along the way, we've seen how people with diverse perspectives and experiences contribute to creative thinking, problem solving, and better solutions for our customers.

The technology industry stands to benefit from increasing the diversity of our talent pool. In recent months, in the spirit of transparency, many technology companies have shared their demographic data to inspire more conversation, outreach, and action. Today, Red Hat is sharing our own numbers:

To improve diversity in both our broader industry and at Red Hat, we are involved in many efforts, including:

• Creation of the Women in Open Source award, a new award program dedicated to recognizing women’s contributions to open source and inspiring future generations of women to get involved. Today, we separately announced that the awards are open for submission, and encourage all involved in open source to nominate themselves, their peers and colleagues, and fellow community members for this award.
• Sponsorship of the The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference and their Open Source Day. This conference, which took place last week, is the world's largest gathering of women technologists and is produced by the Anita Borg Institute and presented in partnership with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
• Participation in diversity-related career fairs and outreach programs, including the University of North Carolina Diverse Reverse Fair, the National Black Society of Black Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers Career Fair at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina A&T's Extreme IT Day, and Pearl Hacks.
• Production of our It Gets Better video, in support of LGBT youth.
• Expansion of our Women's Leadership Community, which provides a forum for women at Red Hat to exchange ideas and experiences, network, participate in educational and cultural programs, grow as leaders and decision makers, and make a positive contribution to the next generation of women leaders in open source.
• Hosting our annual women's luncheon at Red Hat Summit.
• Sponsorship of events and outreach efforts, including AdaCamp, RuPy, GNOME Outreach Program for Women, and PyLadies.

These efforts are just the beginning, and we encourage our fellow technology companies, Red Hat associates, and all open source communities to join us as we continue our efforts. We're delighted with the increased momentum and transparency around diversity in our industry, and we believe there's no greater driver of progress than the passion, commitment, and power of a community.