If we’re going to create work that reflects the world we live in, we need a team that does the same — So we’re working carefully to hire all kinds of different people and encourage a culture where each individual is supported and comfortable bringing their ideas and full selves to work.

This diversity report is a snapshot of our agency-wide effort to learn about, design, and implement increasingly diverse, equitable, and inclusive systems. There’s a focus on identity metrics because any system that succeeds in achieving fairness should naturally produce a representational group — so this is how we’re measuring success.

With that said, this data is only a review of our internal progress — the ultimate success we’re working toward is long-term, permanent improvement in our industry, community, and culture.

Our gender, race, and ethnic identity data is provided voluntarily and in alignment with EEOC guidelines.

We look at the U.S. Census to provide a benchmark for representation data. We know this isn’t a perfect source of information, so we’re supplementing our expectations with 3rd party studies from sources like the Pew Research Center and reports from industry leaders like Google.

In 2021 we started measuring our internal Inclusion and Equity sentiments via an anonymous Employee Experience Survey. This has been so unbelievably helpful, we wish we’d started years ago.

We look toward the U.S. Census to establish benchmarks for fair gender representation and self-identification (50.5% women). This does not yet include data for non-binary genders which Pew estimates to account for 1.6% of adults.

Since developing more intentional hiring policies, our agency wide gender representation has seen dramatic changes. Moving forward, we’re looking more closely at differences across disciplines and levels.

The changes we’ve made at the all-agency level aren’t yet realized across leadership. Leadership roles at Hook are most often filled from within, so we are continuously investing in skill development and leadership training programs to accelerate growth. Our expectation is that these figures will adapt to match all-agency representation over time.

Our goal is to maintain at least 40% BIPOC representation across the organization by 2025. In the longer term, we are working to increase diversity within our creative industry — an influential group that does not yet fairly represent Black and Latinx communities.

Since setting this goal in 2020, we’ve seen a 23% increase in racial and ethnic diversity. We believe these immediate changes are the result of a better recruiting process including a greatly expanded talent sourcing programs and a more equitable candidate evaluation process.

As with gender representation, racial and ethnic diversity within our leadership group is changing more slowly.

In pursuit of both immediate results and long-term change, we’re working to further increase agency representation through the growth of new and existing initiatives:

2022 was our first year measuring agency-wide inclusion sentiment. We calculated a score based on a collection of questions included in the Employee Experience Survey. Now, with a benchmark in place, our goal is to make improvements every year.

These results have informed new goals across the organization and inspired the development of new programs and initiatives like an expert speaker series and a staff-run resource group.

We began measuring agency-wide perception of equity in 2022, and continue to do so this year. Calculated from a mix of questions in our Employee Experience Survey, the score represents an average across fairness, advancement, and compensation-related topics. The data captured here informs the initiatives for the following year, with a goal to continue to increase equity at Hook.

We continue to develop new programs and initiatives around transparency, compensation, and performance evaluation, with the goal of ensuring that we continue to be an open and transparent organization.

The primary insight coming out of the survey was that we needed to become a more transparent organization.