Last year’s Diversity Annual Report attempted to bring urgency and ambition to our DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) efforts, though we noted “it is likely to get harder before it gets easier.” But we couldn't imagine how hard it would get, and how different the world would be. The war in Ukraine and economic uncertainty combined in a perfect storm, leaving the tech industry — including Snap — facing extraordinary headwinds.

This different world shaped the questions we asked in 2022: how do we operationalize DEI with fewer resources, set against a more challenging backdrop? How do we embed DEI at the heart of our business, while our business sharpens its focus on essentials? What are critical DEI priorities to protect?

Making DEI a business imperative requires a paradigm shift in thinking. Instead of asking “what DEI tasks should we add to our urgent to-do list?” we must continue to ask “how do we introduce a DEI lens to all our work?” This is the paradigm shift called for in the Action to Catalyze Tech (ACT) Report, written by a group of DEI experts, that we helped initiate in Jan 2020 and published at the end of 2021. During 2022, we did this work in stops and starts while reducing the size of our team and reprioritizing our business. This report tells the story of that work — some of which ended in failure, some of which is only just underway, and some of which is already paying dividends.

We hope that sharing our successes and setbacks will help others struggling with similar challenges. Just because no company has solved the DEI dilemma, doesn’t make it impossible. But 2022 taught us that we must continuously reimagine our business in a different world.