Kris Leslie is the first woman to be elected chair of the board of Blue Shield of California in the company's 81-year history. The company has also recently added Guillermo Diaz, Jr. and Colleen Johnston to their board, achieving total gender parity and increasing its racial diversity. Blue Shield is heads and shoulders ahead of its industry: of health companies in the Fortune 500, executive teams are projected to take 77 years to reach 45% women in leadership, while boards will wait 72 years (according to Rock Health).

At Parity.org, our unique focus is on helping companies create a better, more inclusive culture so that great talent has an equal shot at top, decision-making roles in the company. We know that there are already more than enough qualified women and people of color to have gender and racial parity at the top of corporations today, where the representation gap is the widest. But change has been slow, and many companies aren’t sure where to start. More and more, companies are realizing that creating diversity and inclusion takes a multifaceted approach and can’t be solved with hiring alone.

Today, Parity.org is proud to launch our ParityPledge in Support of People of Color.

Every year on Mother’s Day, we celebrate mothers with the same gifts: flowers, breakfast in bed, cards, homemade art, the usual.

In December of 2018, Varex Imaging signed the Corporate ParityPledge® after an employee brought it to their attention. Since then, the medical technology company has used internal communication tools to share the pledge with its employees, leading to more than 50 employees in multiple countries signing the Individual ParityPledge. As a result, Varex Imaging leads the way in individual pledges taken at a company.

Parity.org CEO Cathrin Stickney hosted a mainstage panel on diversity at Silicon Slopes, and was honored to be joined by Kamy Scarlett (Global CHRO, Best Buy), Dan Heasman (Chief People Officer, MongoDB), Dr. Maria Klawe (President, Harvey Mudd College), and Deanna Bass (Global D&I Leader, Procter & Gamble). The panelists offered insights and strategies for reducing bias that apply to anyone, from small startups to universities to Fortune 100 companies.

Would you say we live in a balanced world?

Only 20 Nobel Prizes have ever been awarded to women for advances in science.

This week, a California law was signed that will require publicly traded companies to include at least one woman on their boards by the end of 2019. And depending on the size of the board, just one woman is not enough—if a board has five directors, two must be women; if a board has six or more directors, three must be women. Companies have until 2021 to get compliant with this portion of the law.

Parity.org is proud to celebrate our first anniversary and thank our supporters, sponsors, and partners, who have all helped make our inaugural year a success. This year, we were able to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq on International Women's Day, speak at the 14,000-attendee Silicon Slopes conference, add to our team, and see the ParityPledge™ signed in four continents.