Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion don’t just make Treehouse a great place to work, it’s at the center of our work. Treehouse was founded in 2011 with the purpose of making tech more accessible through affordable and engaging online tech education. In 2016, we signed the TechTown PDX diversity pledge and decided to change the way we look at diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many qualified people have been boxed out of tech due to historical inequality in the United States. When we signed the diversity pledge, we realized that as a company that is filling the tech pipeline, we have a moral obligation to make EDI our priority, or else we’re contributing to the problem.

Now, we’ve taught over 260,000 people how to code and design, and our goal is to create lasting, systemic change in tech. In 2016 we launched the Treehouse Apprenticeship Program to help companies build diverse, local talent pipelines into their software engineering teams. We’ve partnered with the Boys & Girls Club, Salvation Army, and AnitaB.org to place over 100 apprentices at tech companies across the nation. In the Spring of 2020 we decided to open source how we worked to reduce barriers in employment through apprenticeship to invite other companies and organizations to join us on this journey.

We believe that achieving equity, diversity, and inclusion requires doing constant work to learn, grow, and change. We have a long way to go, but we are dedicated to building a more equitable, diverse, & inclusive environment at Treehouse and in the larger tech industry.

Our Progress

Here’s some of the work we’re actively doing internally to make Treehouse an inclusive and equitable place to work:

Improving Hiring

• We place emphasis on investing in womxn and people of color from local communities, to provide the opportunity for a career path with us and with partner companies.
• We anonymize job applications to hide gender, age, ethnicity, and educational background. This helps us reduce unconscious bias.
• Because we know there are many avenues to receive an education, we do not require college degrees or certifications as job qualifications.

Creating an Equitable & Inclusive Environment

• In an effort to achieve our value of getting everyone to the same starting line, all employees are required to participate in a 5 part Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion training.
• We actively find and close unfair gender pay gaps through an annual compensation review.
• We work to understand and remove behaviors that hold women and people of color back in career progression.
• We provide programs to further our EDI education through Lunch & Learns and a monthly visual series of Installment on a variety of EDI concepts and celebrations.
• Our employees mean the world to us which means we want to make sure they’re happy and feel heard. For this reason, we partnered with TinyPulse to regularly check in on how folx are feeling as well as CultureAmp for annual surveys.

Partnering with the Community

• We understand our work isn’t successful unless we’re working with the community. We partner and collaborate with TechTownPDX to work with other companies in the area and offer programs.

We know there’s still work to be done which is why even though we’ve made incredible strides, we’re aware we need to regularly work towards our equity, diversity, and inclusion goals through the OKRs we set yearly and the guidance from our EDI committee.