85.9% of employers worldwide say nothing about diversity on their careers sites

Full methodology

How every figure on this page was produced, what counts and what does not, and how often our reading is wrong. Data to 27 October 2026; reader version 34.

1. What we read

Our crawler visits employer websites and keeps their careers pages: addresses such as /careers, /jobs or careers.example.com, the pages they link to, and the job adverts on them. It reads up to 30 pages per website, no more than three links deep. We read the text of each page as it was served, including navigation and footers. Text inside images and PDFs, and content a browser only loads with JavaScript after the page opens, is not read. Pages were read between 15 May 2026 and 27 October 2026.

2. Who is in the sample

• Employers only. We leave out recruitment agencies, staffing firms, job boards and applicant-tracking platforms, which publish other companies' jobs. We identify them with our own website classifier and a manually maintained list. We also leave out any site whose pages name two or more other companies as the hirer (aggregators and investors' portfolio job boards), and any single page that is another company's advert.
• English-language pages. Our reader works in English, so an employer is in the sample when at least one of its pages is in English: at least 30 words, at least 8% of them among the 20 most common English words ("the", "and", "you", "our" and so on). Its pages in other languages are not read. An employer with no English page is not in the sample at all, rather than being counted as silent.
• One employer counts once, however many pages we read for it.

That leaves 404,867 employers worldwide.

3. When an employer "says something"

An employer counts as publishing a statement when at least one of its English pages contains any of the following. Everything else counts as saying nothing. On a job advert with structured data we read the advert and the page around it, because the equal-opportunity line usually sits in the page footer.

• Equal opportunity wording: "equal opportunity employer" or "equal opportunities employer"; "EOE"; "EEO" as a line of its own; "provides equal employment opportunities"; "all qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, colour, religion…"; "affirmative action employer"; an equal opportunities policy.
• A diversity, equity or inclusion commitment: "committed to diversity", equality or inclusion; "diversity and inclusion" or "diversity, equity and inclusion"; D&I, DE&I, ED&I; "we value", celebrate or embrace diversity; an "inclusive workplace", employer, culture or environment; a "diverse workforce".
• Who is welcome: "we welcome applications from all", from everyone, or from under-represented groups; the UK "Disability Confident" scheme.
• Non-discrimination: "regardless of race, religion, gender…"; and "will not discriminate" or "without regard to race…" in the same sentence as an employment word such as applicants, hiring, employment or positions.

In the United States the "Equal Opportunity Employer" line is common and is often a legal requirement for federal contractors. It still counts as a statement, so part of the gap between countries reflects law rather than choice.

4. What does not count

• The same words used about something else: EEO compliance, training or reporting as a job duty; US labour-law poster lists ("EEO is the Law", polygraph notices); privacy notices about personal data; equal housing opportunity.
• "Diversity" that is not about people at work: "biodiversity", "a diversity of projects", "a diverse client base".
• "EDI" or "DEI" alone, because EDI is just as often Electronic Data Interchange. These count only with a diversity, equality or inclusion word in the same sentence.
• Statements elsewhere on a company's website, such as annual reports, ESG or investor pages, are not seen unless they are part of the careers pages we read.

5. LGBT+ mentions

An employer mentions LGBT+ staff when its pages describe an LGBT+ or Pride staff network, membership of or an award from a workplace-equality scheme such as Stonewall, or name LGBT+ people among those it welcomes or includes, beside a staff or workplace word. Services for LGBT+ people, exhibitions, "Pride and Prejudice" and "take pride" do not count.

6. Which country an employer is in

A .com address says nothing about country, so we use what the pages say: currency, phone codes, postcodes and ZIP codes, city and country names, and country-only terms such as 401(k) or superannuation. Points are added up across all of an employer's pages. We assign a country only when one country has at least 3 points and at least twice the points of the next, so unclear and multinational employers are left unassigned rather than guessed. The "Equal Opportunity Employer" line is never used as evidence of the United States, so the country figures cannot be produced by the thing they measure. A country appears in the table only with at least 50 employers. The United Kingdom row comes from this worldwide sample. It is not the figure from our separate study of UK employers' careers pages, which reads a different set of employers.

7. How accurate is it?

On 28 October 2026 we checked a random sample, drawn evenly across employers, against what their pages actually say:

• 400 employers counted as saying nothing. We searched every page we read for them for any diversity-related word and read each passage found. 300 had no such wording at all. 13 (3.3%) had a statement our reader missed, such as "committed to the principle of equality in employment", or a non-discrimination notice placed straight after a list of jobs. A further 17 (4.3%) used loose wording, such as "an inclusive team culture", that could be read either way.
• 200 employers counted as publishing a statement. We read the passage that triggered each one. 7 (3.5%) were wrong, such as "we welcome applications from all carers" or a consultant's CV listing diversity work. A further 5 were borderline.

The two errors do not cancel out. The error rates are similar, but far more employers are counted as silent than as speaking, so the missed statements outnumber the false ones and the published share of employers saying nothing is likely a little high. Correcting for the clear errors gives about 83.6% worldwide, against the 85.9% we publish. Counting the borderline wording as statements as well gives about 80%. With samples of this size, each error rate is accurate to within about two to three percentage points. We publish the reader's figure, not the corrected one, so that every number on this page comes from the same rule applied the same way to every employer.

8. Limits

• This measures what employers publish on their careers pages, not what they practise.
• English-language pages only, so the sample leans towards countries where English is used at work.
• We read the careers pages we could find. Some employers keep jobs on another company's recruitment platform or load them in ways our crawler cannot read, and some employers will have pages we did not reach.
• Pages change. A page read in May may say something different today.