How GoDaddy Reinvented Themselves As Gender Champions

GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward life-fulfilling independent ventures. We power the world’s largest cloud platform dedicated to small, independent ventures. With more than 14 million customers worldwide and more than 63 million domain names under management, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers, and manage their work.

One of our key business priorities over the past several years has been shifting the brand towards a much more inclusive organization. Our Women in Tech initiative started with the appointment of Blake Irving as GoDaddy’s CEO in 2013. We had used edgy marketing tactics in the past to become the largest domain registrar in the world and roughly a billion-dollar company. We distinguished ourselves as a virtual household name in terms of brand recognition, but remained misunderstood as an employer. Everyone in the U.S. knows who GoDaddy is, a halo brand for domains, but not a lot of people know what GoDaddy does. There was a strong business need to change this.

Our top 3 strategic initiatives as we began this transformation in 2013 were to transform the brand, grow the business globally, and build a diverse and best in class product and engineering function. We traditionally did not have a strong employment brand within the engineering community. In fact, we had a negative employment brand hiring engineers, particularly from Silicon Valley. We had to find ways to reestablish our employment brand messaging and our advertising to be more about what we do and who we do it for.

WHY WE DID IT

We believe diverse teams build better products. We’re committed to balancing the gender gap & recruiting great women at all levels to help us better serve our customers, more than half of whom are women who own small businesses.

To help GoDaddy become a more inclusive environment, we committed to a variety of initiatives that include networking, mentoring, sponsorships, data-sharing, salary transparency, and STEM education partnerships.

WHAT WE DID

One of the first steps we took was deliberately shifting our marketing approach. We moved from an awareness phase of “Who GoDaddy Is” to a transition phase promoting “What GoDaddy Does” for small businesses globally.

We needed to show the world that we had changed the direction of our advertising and marketing. Our first big marketing move was with a Super Bowl ad in which a real woman (not actor) quit her day job during the SB ad in order to start her own small business, and follow her passion. This was truly an ad that illustrated how we help people follow their passion.

Our employees embraced the efforts, too. Our corporate branding efforts to attract people to our site did not reflect our internal culture and our employees wanted people to know that where they worked was an awesome company with an inclusive culture. A place where you have a voice and can do the best work of your career. This was one of the reasons we launched GoDaddy Brave, an employee blog series on Medium where GoDaddy employees share stories of bravery in their personal and professional lives.

Recruiting became laser-focused on recruiting women. We initially did not put any formal rules or mandates in place, we just focused on proactively expanding our pool of candidates to include more women. We changed our branding tactics to address a larger market of women, and leveraged the women in the company to refer women they knew. We also added data to our quarterly scorecards. We now track how many women we hire in our customer support team, and how many female engineers we hire every quarter. We can view this by location and level as well.

Employment Branding efforts included a deep review of all our messaging. Our website at one point noted our “Sunnyvale office was like a Stanford Engineering dorm”, needless to say we changed that. Our job descriptions referred to engineers as “code ninjas”. That had to go. We adopted a tool, text.io, to make every job description more gender neutral.

Our people operations team played a huge role in this as well. Compensation, HRIS and Talent Management worked with the leadership team to build our compensation model (title conventions and leveling company-wide). We also started tracking data, current and future, we wanted to better understand. Our talent management team engaged with the Clayman Institute from Stanford on a project that would dramatically change the way we assess performance in the company. We partnered to eliminate bias and drive consistent performance evaluations and calibrations.

Our communications department, internal and external, played a huge role in defining our messaging and engaging top news publications who could help tell our story.

We put ourselves out there and were one of the first tech companies to share our salary data by gender and role. This year we included our diversity stats as well (details below).

HOW WE DID IT

We attacked this shift towards becoming a more inclusive organization across a variety channels. This started with how we present ourselves externally. We changed our marketing campaigns to reflect what we do as a company and the customers we support. Most people who know GoDaddy know us as a Domain Registrar, but we have 55+ products and services spanning Website Building, Hosting, Security, Online Marketing, Email and Office products, to name a few.

We made a clear shift in our Super Bowl advertising to focus on our core customer – the small business entrepreneur. This is our ad from 2015.

GoDaddy raises a chip with some dip to the men and women who sacrifice so much to run their businesses.

We also focused our efforts on developing deep relationships with diverse organization. Blake was invited by the Anita Borg Institute and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing to sit on a male allies panel to open the dialogue and build a relationship with this community. This was a tough crowd because the female engineers were still associating GoDaddy with our previous marketing. GoDaddy was not a desired member of this community but we persisted, convinced them of our transformation and sincerity. Eventually we won them over by being very transparent with our new branding approach and focus.

We have gratefully been a platinum sponsor and corporate partner member for the last 3 years. Blake has taken to the stage at the last two events, once as a keynote. Blake was not the only one to speak at these events. We’ve had many female delegates and male allies attend and speak at the GHC every year. This year four different women spoke to standing room only crowds about how women can be successful in tech.

Blake was also an Executive Producer of the documentary Code – Debugging the Gender Gap. CODE exposes the dearth of American female and minority software engineers and explores the reasons for this gender gap. CODE raises the question: what would society gain from having more women and minorities code?

Irana Wasti, SVP of Productivity joined 3 ½ years ago and lead the charge in establishing GoDaddy’s Women in Technology employee resource group (ERG). She partnered with an amazing group of technologists and GDWIT is currently our largest group with 500+ members. More employees picked up on these efforts to create a variety of new ERG’s across the company. Additional ERG’s sprung up quickly as grassroot efforts company wide.

• Women in Tech (GDWIT)
• GoDaddy UNITED, our LGBT group
• GoDaddy Veterans (GDVET)
• African Americans in Tech (GDAAIT)
• Latinos in Tech (GDLIT)
• GoDaddy Fit (GDFIT), our Health and Wellness group

We are so proud of the different groups and the engagement of our employees in making us better.

Here is a bit more detail about our GDWIT group:

GoDaddy Women In Technology (GDWIT) is an employee volunteer driven group that will run company-wide events, including live broadcast of speaker events, mixers and volunteer opportunities. Each GoDaddy location will also have its own GDWIT chapter and is completely inclusive, with membership and event participation open to all full time employees, including both men and women.

Our goals are to create an ongoing conversation among employees regarding issues of interest to women in the workplace and to provide new opportunities to create impact for women and girls in our local communities.

These conversations have been lead by a stellar speaker series and through ongoing events:

• Joy Buolamwini, 25 year-old experiential entrepreneur, Rhodes Scholar and Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholar
• Maria Klawe, President, Harvey Mudd College
• Madeline Di Nonno, CEO, Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media
• Mitchell Baker, Chairwoman, Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation
• Elisa Steele, CEO and President at Jive Software
• BlogHer, Co-Founders, Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort
• Bites and Bytes, a networking event in Sunnyvale featuring Danica Patrick
• Ashley Milne-Tyte, podcast host of The Broad Experience: a conversation about women, the workplace, and success
• Girl Geek, a GoDaddy GDWIT co-sponsored mentoring dinner
• Danica Patrick, the most successful woman in the history of American open-wheel racing
• Telle Whitney, CEO and President of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
• TEDWomen, three-session conference about the power of women and girls to be creators and change-makers

We also had a focused effort to ensure gender balance in our Executive team. GoDaddy has always had great female representation in our senior leadership team. Barb Rechterman, CMO (2nd employee and Forbes 50 Most Influential CMO’s of 2014) and Nima Kelly, Chief Legal Counsel (14+ years at GoDaddy and named Most Influential Women in Arizona, AZ Business) to name a few, but Blake wanted more.

Blake led the efforts to hire Elissa Murphy to be our CTO, Lauren Antonoff, SVP of Product and Engineering, Karen Tillman, Chief Communications Officer, Debra Weissman, SVP of Cloud Platforms and countless more. We focused heavily on interns and new college graduates, too. It has been a top down and bottom up approach.

Gender Equality

For the second consecutive year, GoDaddy has audited internal salary data, analyzing like-for-like roles, comparing how men and women were placed in the salary band for comparable roles. GoDaddy sets its salary bands by role and level, and ranks well in how it compensates its employee against industry averages.

The new salary data shows women, in technical ranks, and overall, make a penny more than men, but men in more senior leadership roles make about two cents more on the dollar than their female counterparts. Below are the breakouts in various categories across the company with year-over-year data.

We also made sure that we were not perpetuating the problem of salary inequity. When we have an open headcount, we look at the budget for the role and make an offer based on what the role is worth, not what they were making in their past roles.

GoDaddy Gender Diversity

The latest data shows GoDaddy has slightly increased the number of women in technology ranks. Women in the company’s leadership category held at twenty-five-percent, the senior leader category has lagged, as compared to last year.

A closer look at the engineering ranks, shows a year-over-year improvement with women in entry-level jobs, however women in more senior engineering posts are lacking.

Our current focus is shifting to the mid-career and senior- level female technologists. We have broadened our focus to also grow our black, latinx and asian populations so we can build an even more diverse team.

2016 Data: See Infographic below

• 36% Female Interns
• 50% Female New College Graduates
• 25% Female Tech employees
• 25% Female Senior Leadership and Leaders in the company