The Oscar Blog
Expanding Our Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging Efforts
Jun 7, 2021
Reflecting on our efforts to be a more thoughtful and inclusive company – including the publication of our 2020 DI&B Report and awarding $200,000 in Culturally Competent Care Grants – and making a public commitment to continue this important work as we grow Oscar and further our mission of making a healthier life accessible and affordable for all. We founded Oscar because we saw the clear systemic flaws in the American health care system. Flaws that made it too expensive and too inconvenient for far too many Americans to obtain quality health care. And we have seen that those barriers to care are worsened by both the conscious and unconscious biases that divide us. One of our company’s values is “Be Transparent.” We take pride in being transparent with our members, and we owe the same to our employees and stakeholders. We recognize the importance of diversity, inclusion, and belonging efforts in the workplace. We believe that having a diverse employee base will empower our community, drive better business outcomes, and ultimately allow us to better serve our members. To that end, we have developed Oscar’s inaugural Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging report, providing objective analytics that set a baseline for our company and fuel our commitment to being a more diverse and inclusive employer and health care company. As a company, our employees come from a wide range of backgrounds and historically underrepresented peoples have representation at Oscar. Hiring trends in leadership show that we are making progress towards ensuring that decision makers at the highest levels of our company reflect our diverse world. We know the work does not stop there, and we will continue the important work to realize our goal of being a more equitable and representative health company.The report demonstrates increases in employee and leadership diversity by both gender and ethnicity year over year since 2017. Today, Oscar is a majority female company and female representation reached an all-time high thanks to new hires in 2020.New hires at Oscar are from underrepresented populations and we are steadily growing a community of Black, Latinx, and South Asian employees.
Growth in ethnic and gender diversity at the employee level is outpacing the growth in ethnic and gender diversity of our leadership team. While we are challenged to do better, we are trending towards our goal, with 2020 numbers showing that our leadership team is the most diverse since 2017. In 2020, we focused on ensuring that employees have a welcoming, open environment where they can express themselves freely, where our leadership is making decisions informed by a broad spectrum of lived experiences, and where we are acting as a positive force for justice and equity in the communities that we serve. As we grow, we are putting intentional focus on a commitment to diversity, inclusion and belonging: the way we hire, the work environment we create, and the products and services we offer to our members, ensuring that each of them is able to get the care they need and deserve in an accessible and equitable way. This report represents just the start of our public commitment to building a company that reflects the values of diversity, inclusion and belonging. We are building a community that represents a broad spectrum of racial, ethnic, and gender experiences, but there is more to be done. We welcome each of you - our employees, our peers and our members - as partners on this journey. The work of building a more equitable and fair health system, workplace and society requires us to hold each other accountable, demand transparency and engage in critical dialogue that challenges us all to do better.
Mario Schlosser, CEO & Co-Founder