Inclusion and diversity in Canada

At Accenture, we continue to take actions that advance our unwavering commitment to equality and justice for all, with zero tolerance for racism, bigotry and hate of any kind—within our company and in our communities.

Although we’ve made considerable progress, it has not happened fast enough. Last year, the tragic losses of Black lives in North America hastened the discussion of what every person and every organization can do to help create equal opportunities for all. We responded by closely examining every aspect of our workplace experience. That led to concrete steps, including developing a roadmap and long-term strategy for addressing and overcoming systemic racism in a more strategic way and setting goals to build a workforce and leadership that better reflects the diversity of our workforce in Canada.

Charting our progress

In 2016, Accenture in Canada began publishing comprehensive data about its workforce. Every year since, we’ve shared our workforce composition and currently share our demographics focusing on gender, race and ethnicity, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ2S+ and current or former military service members. To this day, we are the only professional services company in Canada to publicly share this level of detail and we take pride in our transparency and continuing to push ourselves to do more.

Since we began reporting our data we’ve made great strides, including:

• Increasing the representation of Visible Minorities by 14.2 percentage points, Indigenous Peoples by more than 1.1 percentage points, persons with disabilities by more than 6.3 percentage points and executive women by 1.9 percentage points.
• Expanding our data to include LGBTQ2S+, where we have increased our representation by 1.6% since we began reporting, and current or former military service members, where we have slightly decreased by 0.1%.
• Setting ambitious internal workforce representation goals across nine key dimensions of diversity inclusive of gender, race & ethnicity among other drivers – both for our overall workforce and our senior leaders.
• Enhancing our on-campus partnerships with Black student clubs, resulting in 16% of 2021 internship opportunities being offered to Black student talent.
• Offering candidates the opportunity to voluntarily self-identify at the application stage across many dimensions of diversity including gender, race & ethnicity, sexual orientation, persons with disabilities and military veterans – so that we can assess candidate progress at an aggregate level and identify & address any potential barriers.
• Reinventing recruitment, retention, development, staffing, sponsorship and advancement programs to help fulfill all of our inclusion & diversity goals.

The passion our people at Accenture have for equality and making positive, impactful change has never been stronger. This has allowed us to be recognized for the 9th consecutive year as one of Canada’s Best Diversity employers. I’m proud of what we have accomplished and yet we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We will continue to be transparent and we will not stop until we have achieved our goal of becoming the most inclusive and diverse company in Canada.

Jeffrey Russell

President, Accenture Canada