Facebook’s Civil Rights Audit and Commerce in its hearing on “Inclusion in Tech: How Diversity Benefits All Americans.” Without meaningful diversity or the right people in decision making, companies may not be able to account for blind spots and biases. That said, having people of color in leadership roles is not the same as having people who have been deeply educated and experienced in understanding civil rights law and policy. People of color and civil rights expertise are not interchangeable. Treating them as such risks both reducing people of color to one-dimensional representatives of their race or national origin and unfairly saddling them with the responsibility, burden, and emotional labor of identifying civil rights concerns and advocating internally for them to be addressed. Facebook needs to continue to both drive meaningful progress on diversity and inclusion and build out its civil rights infrastructure, including bringing civil rights expertise in-house. This chapter proceeds in five parts. First, it explains the strategies animating Facebook’s diversity and inclusion programs and the company’s D & I resources. Second, it describes the trajectory of Facebook’s employment figures and discusses Facebook’s hiring goals. Third, it summarizes relevant programs and initiatives intended to advance the company’s D & I goals. Fourth, it offers the Auditors’ observations on Facebook’s internal D & I efforts and suggested improvements. Fifth, it discusses the status of Facebook’s partner, vendor, and supplier diversity efforts and provides the Auditors’ observations on those efforts. 1. Facebook’s Diversity & Inclusion Strategy & Resources Facebook’s diversity and inclusion program began in earnest in 2014, when it hired its first Global Chief Diversity Officer to define Facebook’s diversity and inclusion strategy and begin to build out a diversity and inclusion department at the company. Facebook states that its ultimate objective in pursuing diversity and inclusion efforts is to make better products and policies by leveraging employees’ different perspectives, skills and experience. With that goal in mind, diversity and inclusion strategies are aimed at: • increasing the number of employees from underrepresented groups; • building fair and inclusive systems for employee performance and development, including cultivating an environment that promotes employee retention of talent and leverages different perspectives, and implementing processes that support all people in their growth; and • integrating D & I principles into company-wide systems. The Auditors are not taking a position of support or opposition to these diversity strategies but are merely sharing what Facebook says it is doing. Facebook reports that it has created a number of programs and initiatives to generate progress on diversity and inclusion, which are outlined in Section 3 below. When it comes to D & I at Facebook, the Auditors understand that the D & I team is strongly resourced (although the Auditors are not privy to exact budget numbers). It is also supported by approximately 40 members of the People Analytics team including data scientists, sociologists, social scientists, race and bias experts, and the People Growth team (whose expertise is in talent planning and career development). Furthermore, with its Global Chief Diversity Officer now sitting on Facebook’s executive management team and (as of June 2020) reporting directly to 62