On Wednesday, Amazon employees who work on the company's hardware devices and the Alexa voice assistant received an email titled "BHM," short for Black History Month.
In the email, obtained by Insider, Amazon's senior vice president of devices and services, Dave Limp, said he was writing in celebration of Black History Month and reiterated the company's commitment to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
He also reminded every employee to complete Amazon's new DEI training program, called "Strengthening Our Culture of Inclusion," a 90-minute session intended to raise awareness around workplace diversity issues.
"This training is the first of many new initiatives you'll see in 2021 to build a more inclusive environment," Limp wrote in the email.
Similar emails to all the other full-time corporate Amazon employees have been sent in recent weeks, asking them to complete the inclusion training program.
The emails also shed light on an area that could become of greater focus under incoming CEO Andy Jassy.
Jassy is outspoken on diversity issues, often tweeting in support of Black Americans and court decisions that protect immigrants and LGBTQ minorities. Last year, Jassy met with members of an internal affinity group called Black Employee Network (BEN), which led to the company's pledge to double the number of Black leaders in 2020 and 2021. The company also announced at the time that it was banning the use of "non-inclusive" language in engineering documents and would start rolling out new DEI training programs, Insider previously reported.
And this year, Jassy became the new executive sponsor for BEN, serving as a direct contact for the Black employee group.
Jassy's proactive approach to workplace diversity stands in contrast to how Jeff Bezos, the person he will replace later this year, is known for handling the issue.
Bezos was often criticized for the lack of female and minority representation in Amazon's most upper ranks. His most exclusive group of senior leaders, called the S-team, featured only one female leader until early last year. When an employee asked Bezos about it during a 2017 internal all-hands meeting, Bezos shrugged it off, saying he expected "any transition there to happen very incrementally over a long period of time."
Last year, Amazon ended up adding a number of women and minority leaders to the S-team, including its first Black female member, Alicia Boler Davis, the vice president of customer fulfillment.
But Amazon still appears to have a long way to go. The company's most recent workforce data, published at the end of 2019, showed that more than 70% of global managerial roles were filled by men, and 60% of US leadership positions were occupied by white people.
A group of shareholders is attempting to change that by bringing a new resolution to vote at this year's shareholder meeting that would require Amazon to consider qualified women and minority candidates for all open positions. But Amazon requested that federal regulators block the proposal last week, saying it already had "many programs in place" to address the issue of diversity.
In Jassy's case, just three out of his 14 direct reports were women as of late November, Insider previously reported. Only a handful of nonwhite men were found in the 95 top executives under his management.
Amazon's spokesperson confirmed Limp's email and the various programs related to inclusion but didn't provide a statement for this story.
