Sharpening our Focus on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We take our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) seriously. It has been a guiding light for the policies and processes we have in place to honor the people we serve, those who work here and the partners we do business with.

We’ve seen the difference that our DEI policies designed to cultivate high-performing teams can make on customer service and our financial bottom line.

For over two decades, we’ve been refining our practices and enhancing our knowledge. Recent events have drawn attention to the impact of systemic racism and social injustices, prompting our organization to sharpen its focus on DEI and develop a new DEI Framework. Through this framework we are actively engaged with initiatives to provide a transparent account of the progress we’re making toward our goals. That’s the purpose of this report, to share the goals we’ve established and the work we’re doing to deliver results. We’ve made initial progress in five priority areas that closely align with our mission, vision, and values. Some of the highlights include:

• Culture: Conducted multiple all-team seminars on unconscious bias to enhance cultural competence and foster trust.
• Talent Management: Implemented DEI language into our recruitment materials and expanded training and career development opportunities for advancement.
• Health Equity: Conducted outreach to health plan members to self-identify important demographic information and strengthened our health equity commitment by participating with other large health care purchasers.
• Supplier Diversity: Increased vendor and supplier participation in a voluntary program that helps us better understand this community through the lens of DEI. Our changes to simplify this program and methods of soliciting vendor and supplier input resulted in a 200% increase in participation.
• Investments: Held directors at the companies we invest in accountable for lack of progress on improving corporate board diversity, including voting against 197 corporate board directors at companies where diversity engagements did not result in constructive outcomes.

As a global leader with a fiduciary duty to deliver pension and health benefits to the millions of public employees who serve California, we have a role and a responsibility to champion DEI policies that can help balance the scales — to create equitable opportunities, to improve financial performance, and carve a path for others to follow.

This is highly collaborative work that can’t be done alone. We share our work with you to keep you informed of our progress, to take accountability for our commitments, and encourage your ongoing support of our initiatives to further DEI.

Sincerely,
 

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