AMA's COMMITMENT TO
DIVERSITY, EQUITY,
INCLUSION, AND ACCESSIBILITY
Our Philosophy
AMA employees celebrating International Woman's Day 2019 at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
AMA values doing the right thing for our customers, our employees, and our community. We are committed to promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEI&A) and consider it foundational to our work. Knowing that we do our best work as a diverse team, AMA has taken many steps to foster a diverse, inclusive, and accessible environment and considers DEI&A to be an ongoing practice. We believe in supporting under-represented groups and empowering all employees with development opportunities and have initiated a DEI&A council to drive the continuous DEI&A efforts for our community. If you would like to learn more about our efforts, please contact us at diversitycouncil@ama-inc.com
For years, we have endeavored to assemble teams composed of individuals with diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, gender, sexual orientation, and disabilities. The effectiveness of our efforts clear: 34% of our current staff are women and 22% are minorities. In addition to being the right thing to do, we promote greater diversity in our workforce because it results in multiple perspectives in thought and produces better solutions to our customer challenges.
We train our staff to be aware of and mitigate conscious and unconscious biases, as well as cultural norms that affect individual behaviors. We begin by assembling a leadership team that reflects the diversity we seek in our workforce. AMA, especially our management staff, has decades of hands-on experience managing large teams of diverse personnel across NASA Centers and at other Federal agencies. We encourage our management and technical staff to actively participate in our Corporate Diversity Council, helping inform our DEI&A initiatives and overall strategy. Our DEIA Council's suggestions recently resulted in enhanced partnerships with the Society of Black Engineers, Society of Women Engineers, and Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers to expand our recruiting reach to more diverse and underserved applicants.
A Data-driven approach to DEIA: GEN Certification
AMA has an internal Diversity and Inclusion Councils, and AMA is in the process of becoming GEN certified. GEN captures 5 key metrics that measure company culture/performance against the standard of excellence (i. Bias Neutrality, ii) Employee Resonance, iii) Accessibility, iv) Experience Perception Gap, v) Visible Advocacy). It's a certification based on real metrics, resonating well with our data-driven culture. The GEN Certification supports our continued effort to move beyond talk and engage in meaningful action.
DEIA in the Solutions we Provide
In addition to being a key part of our corporate strategy, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibly is also fundamental part of the solutions we provide to improve life on our planet. AMA is a leader in Open Science, helping solve societal problems all over the globe. Open Science is making data and science accessible to everyone. We address problems related to drought, flooding, agriculture, illegal mining, urbanization, and water quality. Our team helps build technical capacity across the planet.
AMA team in Kenya running a training session on the African Regional Data Cube.
If you have any questions or would like to get in-touch with our DEIA council, please reach out: DiversityCouncil@ama-inc.com