Every year, Redfin publishes a report on the diversity of our workforce. In 2023, diversity at Redfin fell, with people of color declining from 36% of our employees to 35%, compared to 42% of the U.S. population. Black employees declined from 9% of our employees to 7%, compared to 12% of the U.S. population. Latino and Asian employees each remained at 11% of our workforce, the same as in 2022. Sixty-two percent of our employees are women, the same as last year, though the proportion in management fell from 54% to 53%.
We Focus on Race, Ethnicity and Gender Because We Have the Best Data on These Groupings
This diversity report doesn’t address the proportion of our employees who are veterans, gay, transgender or persons with a disability mostly because our data on these groups is sparse. We’ll keep working to create a culture where more employees feel comfortable telling us about their military experience, sexual orientation, or disability status so we can use this data to understand where different groups of employees are struggling or thriving at Redfin.
Racial and Ethnic Diversity of Employees
Due to shifts in department categorization and employee self-identification, the results in this report may differ slightly from those reported in prior blog posts. All representation numbers are end-of-year. Similar to 2022, we have not included the companies Redfin acquired, Bay Equity or Rent. We’re integrating Rent and Redfin in 2024, so we expect to include Rent in our 2025 report, which comes out in spring 2026.
Racial and Ethnic Diversity of Managers
Representation of Women at Redfin
Our Primary Diversity Challenge: Retention
The decline in the representation of people of color and especially Black employees is principally the result of less hiring, coupled with still-higher attrition rates for people of color. In 2023, 27% of Redfin’s white employees left, compared to 31% of Redfin’s employees of color. In 2022, these numbers were 46% of white employees, compared to 61% of Redfin’s employees of color, indicating that the attrition-rate gap narrowed from 15 points in 2022 to four points in 2023.
The People We Are Hiring Are Diverse
Of the 326 people we hired in 2023, 36% were people of color, and 23% were Black or Latino. These are higher percentages than those groups’ current representation levels at Redfin, but the number of people we hired overall wasn’t enough to offset the talent we lost. Slating, in which we hold positions open until we can recruit people of color to interview with hiring managers, has likely increased the diversity of our hiring.
Our Initiatives to Develop and Retain Diverse Talent
But whether we’re hiring a hundred people per year or a thousand, what grieves us is that people of color were still less likely to prosper at Redfin in 2023 than other employees. The first order of business in driving diversity isn’t recruiting new people to join, but building a company where current employees can thrive, and then recommend Redfin to their friends. In 2023, we rolled out three major initiatives to give our employees of color opportunities to grow:
- Leadership development and mentorship programs for people of color to build relationships with executives and with one another, so it isn’t so lonely being the only Latino manager or the only Black agent on a team. I participated in these programs, and left convinced that the groups who participated have a better shot at thriving here than before.
- Semi-annual check-ins for senior execs to review diversity data with their management teams: this is a new initiative, and we’re still trying to figure out what actions we want teams to take when people of color leave who, for budget reasons, are not replaced, but tracking diversity throughout the year has nonetheless been a good habit to develop.
- Training for field leaders to understand how to handle situations when colleagues or customers have seemed uncomfortable with Black people or with discussions of issues that affect Black people, such as when customers seem worried that their agent is Black.
Strategic Initiatives to Support Diversity
The 2023 decline in representation is a setback for a company that has long prided ourselves on diversity. The exec team met a few times throughout the spring to discuss the diversity challenges we’ve encountered by limiting all-remote work and by shifting our recruiting focus to experienced candidates. We came up with two new initiatives:
- An Atlanta Hub: we now ask employees near our Seattle or San Francisco offices to come to the office twice a week, and our hiring favors people near those offices, just because it’s easier to work through some problems face to face. But since Seattle is a largely white city, we’ve decided to start hiring headquarters staff in Atlanta too, where we already have an office through our Rent acquisition. By the fourth quarter of 2024 if not before, we expect to start hiring in Atlanta for a wide range of Redfin’s headquarters roles.
- Recruiting Programs: Redfin Next, our shift to higher bonuses in lieu of agent salaries, has helped us hire more agents with industry experience, but that may hamper our diversity efforts, as our field organization is still significantly more diverse than the industry we’re recruiting from. We’re now rolling out new slating standards in five markets with diverse recruiting pools: Charlotte, Dallas, LA, Houston and Washington DC. Our longstanding commitment has been to slate 61% of roles, ensuring that we interview at least one person of color, but in these five pilot markets, we’ll slate 80% of the roles, ensuring that at least one candidate is from an underrepresented group. For our purposes, the groups that are underrepresented at Redfin are Hispanic, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific islander. We’ll start applying this slating standard on July 1, 2024, and, depending on whether it leads to more successful agents from underrepresented groups, may expand it in 2025.
Why Diversity Matters More Than Ever to Redfin: Diversity Is How We Win
If these initiatives don’t work, we’ll try others. Diversity has fallen out of favor with some companies, but Redfin’s commitment to it is firm, even as we’ve faced one of the worst housing markets in U.S. history. We can’t afford to focus on any issue that doesn’t improve our service and our profits, but we believe that diversity is fundamental to both: for example, we can develop an AI-powered guide to buying a home in America only if we understand the challenges that different groups face on that journey. We can serve the growing number of Latino, Asian and Black homebuyers only if we’re one of the best places for Latino, Asian and Black agents to work.
As With Any Problem, When Redfin Faces Setbacks, We Try a Different Approach
We aren’t trying to mirror the composition of the U.S. population out to four decimal places, as diversity’s critics would sometimes imagine us doing, but we are committed to being fair. The representation of different groups at Redfin will go up and down, but when one group is underrepresented at Redfin, we’ll try to figure out if we’ve been unfair. Anyone with the responsibility to hire, fire, promote and pay people has to pay attention to fairness; anyone responsible for a company’s culture has to make it work for everyone, not just the majority group. It’s hard to be fair, and in some years, as in 2023, we’ll have more setbacks than advances. But we’ll win over time by being honest about our shortcomings, and dogged about getting better.
