For the seventh year, eBay released our Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) Report to share our progress and lessons learned during the past year. In 2022, we continued to focus on our four strategic DE&I objectives: increasing representation, cultivating a sense of belonging, engaging our communities and allies, and building inclusive technology.
Our commitment to making eBay a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment is a core part of our mission to connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all. We know our journey is far from complete, and we remain focused on furthering this work and on what lies ahead.
“We are responsible for ensuring our people feel included and that our marketplace is fair, respectful and free from discrimination,” said Beric Alleyne, Global Head of DE&I.
eBayers around the world held Diwali celebrations in 2022.
Program Highlights
We are focused on increasing representation across all underrepresented groups at every level of the organization — and we progress the work needed to address systemic barriers to true equity.
eBay’s efforts to increase representation included the eBay Talent Accelerator Program (eTAP), a three-day conference that aimed to provide women with the tools, practice and exposure required to support their growth into leaders at eBay. Another program that focused on employee integration was eBay Ireland’s Stepping Stone program which offered employment assistance to those affected by the conflict in Ukraine. Stepping Stone has been such a success, eBay is exploring expansion of opportunities for displaced peoples worldwide.
At the same time, we’re equally focused on building an inclusive workplace, where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work as they grow their careers.
Our first-ever Be For Everyone Experience, a two-day virtual festival, helped cultivate a sense of belonging by giving eBayers the opportunity to hear from global thought leaders and experts. Participants joined interactive experiences and came together as a community to learn, share and listen. Speakers included comedian and writer Trevor Noah, Food Network star Aarti Sequeira and trauma and stress expert Dr. Alisha Moreland Capuia.
DE&I is a fundamental part of who we are.
Central to our DE&I strategy are eBay’s eleven Communities of Inclusion, or COIs. These are global, employee-led communities that focus on age, disability status, ethnicity, military status, caregiver status, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression — helping welcome and connect eBay employees from all over the world.
Over the past year eBay’s COIs hosted events with speakers including global fashion icon Dapper Dan, legal advocate Erin Brockovich and renowned journalist and news anchor Richard Lui, to name a few. The COIs also held multi-city celebrations of Diwali, Black History Month, Pride Month and other moments throughout the year. In 2022, eBay’s 11 COIs collectively led over 175 community events, reaching over 15,000 eBayers around the world.
Engaging our sellers and buyers, business partners as well as the broader communities that we serve continues to be incredibly important to us. We have evolved the ways in which we mobilize our resources and our capital to drive global, long-term systemic change.
The eBay Foundation is a strong example of our commitment to our community. With a long history of charitable giving, 2022 was the Foundation’s biggest year yet. eBay set its all-time record for donations since its inception in 1998, and launched Changemakers, an employee volunteer program that spans four continents and 16 regional teams. “Our new strategy is helping us create deeper relationships with grantees and shift away from historically inequitable practices within philanthropy,” eBay Foundation President Allie Ottoboni said.
Additional customer-facing initiatives included the eYouth program in China, where eBay partners with 642 colleges and universities throughout the country to provide a talent funnel for students to ecommerce businesses, and Black Girl Fest partnership in the UK, in which eBay established a training program to help over 100 Black women-led ecommerce businesses thrive.
Participants at Black Girl Fest learned the right tools, skills and knowledge to sell effectively on eBay.
Finally, as an ecommerce company, it is essential to our identity to ensure that our marketplace is accessible to all. Inclusive technology is a pillar of eBay’s technological efforts, as we strive to maintain the most up-to-date accessibility compliance on all of our platforms. We also create accessibility tools of our own; this year, we launched an open-source tool for designers. This plug-in, called Include, gives designers an easy-to-use interface to incorporate accessibility solutions.
You can read the full DE&I report here.