News

Back in December of 2015, StartUp aired an episode called ‘Diversity Report’ looking at the diversity, or lack thereof at the time, of Gimlet. Back then, Gimlet was just 27 people and only three of them were nonwhite. Gimlet was very white. Not only in the makeup of our staff, but also the content of our programming— most shows were hosted by white men. We knew systemic changes needed to be made to the way we recruit, hire, and program Gimlet shows. 

Since that episode aired, Gimlet has grown to three times that size. We now have over 80+ employees and over a dozen shows. Gimlet has new departments— sales, multiplatform development, marketing, community, finance— and we continue to grow. And with that growth, we’ve made some improvements on the diversity front. Overall, we’re less white, we have more shows hosted by women and people of color. However, we have a lot more work left to do, including broadening our definition of diversity at Gimlet beyond race and gender. 

Why are we doing this? For a couple of reasons. First, Gimlet’s mission is to help our listeners understand the world and each other, and we can’t truly understand each other unless we have a diverse set of voices, life experiences and views. Also, it’s a smart business decision. People of color are the fastest growing segment of society— if we aren’t producing programming by and for more diverse audiences, we just won’t succeed as an audience focused enterprise. 

While we have made progress, we are still far from our goal and know there’s a lot more work to do. In order to reach our goal, we need to: dramatically increase diversity among management at Gimlet; more aggressively recruit diverse candidates; continue to develop and produce representative programming; broaden our definition of diversity and measurement to include gender identity, sexual orientation, and more; and build out a formal training and development program. 

To hold ourselves accountable, and in the spirit of transparency, we are going to be issuing a Gimlet diversity report every year. Below you will find our 2017 Diversity Report with data spliced a few different ways and compared against other baselines, including US population, our 2015 report and more.