AbbVie’s Commitment to Racial Justice

Racial injustice must end. Together, we must be a force for driving the accountability and change that we need to see in our society, both inside and outside AbbVie.


We are deeply concerned about the state of racial equality and social justice in the U.S. Each of us has to stand up and reject bias, racism and the lack of real inclusion. Read more about AbbVie's efforts.

CEO Richard Gonzalez’s letter to employees on racial justice


AbbVie’s statement on racial injustice

Philanthropic support

Since our inception in 2013, AbbVie and the AbbVie Foundation have invested more than $120 million in philanthropic programs that purposefully support diverse communities.

  • We are addressing the achievement gap in our partnerships with Communities In Schools, City Year and the University of Chicago Education Lab, who are working to improve graduation rates, reduce dropout rates and boost college and career readiness for K-12.
  • Through our employee volunteers and our donations, we’ve built school libraries across the U.S., processed and donated thousands of books, and increased access to STEM education.
  • And in North Chicago, we’ve built a brand-new middle school with a 21st century learning environment to improve student success.

In 2020, we donated $5 million to NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Equal Justice Initiative to address issues in our criminal justice system. Later that same year, we launched a $50 million, five-year program to support underserved Black communities across the United States. As part of the investment, we’re collaborating with six nonprofit partners to support health and education opportunity in underserved Black communities.

Our $50 million commitment is funded by the AbbVie Foundation a charitable organization established by AbbVie, Inc. The AbbVie Foundation also matches 3:1 employee donations to select nonprofits whose primary mission is to advance racial equity.

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Our $50 million program to advance racial equity

Meet the six partners we’re working with to drive system change.

Our $50 million program to advance racial equity

Meet the six partners we’re working with to drive system change.


Equity, equality, diversity & inclusion

With a focus on recruiting, developing, retaining and performing, our equality, diversity & inclusion strategy enables us to raise the bar and continue growing. It includes driving awareness and understanding, attracting and sourcing talent, developing and engaging talent and creating connections and community.

A data-driven approach to ensuring clinical trial diversity

AbbVie believes our clinical trials should reflect the populations we serve as we aim to help patients live healthier, longer lives. Ensuring diversity means we can better meet the needs of our patients both today and tomorrow. We are committed to researching and bringing treatment options for diseases that affect patients around the world, including groups of patients who historically have been underserved.

As part of our dedication, AbbVie is committed to being an industry leader in improving clinical research diversity. We rely on real-world data and evidence to guide our diversity and inclusion strategies to ensure participation in AbbVie-sponsored clinical trials appropriately represents patients living with the diseases we are studying. We have been and will continue to analyze our clinical trials to ensure they reflect a diversity in race, ethnicity, age, and gender. To this end, our continuing commitment is as follows:

  • Evaluating our clinical trial protocol eligibility criteria against real-world datasets to ensure we are designing inclusive study protocols, enabling under-represented populations to volunteer for our clinical trials
  • Analyzing and ensuring the age, gender, race, and ethnicity of those enrolled in our clinical trials appropriately reflects the age, gender, race, and ethnicity of the patient population we are studying. If diversity gaps are identified within indications in our portfolio, we will create a tailored plan to address specific gaps. This plan may include enhanced community partnerships, clinical research staff education, investigator trainings, new site selection strategies, and targeted patient outreach.
  • Routinely re-assessing clinical study demographics to determine if our efforts to ensure participation of under-represented populations have made an impact, pivoting to different strategies if necessary.
  • Continuing to refine our clinical trial diversity and inclusion strategies based on analytics and ensuring every team has access to regional indication demographics, including AbbVie resources to help resolve previously identified diversity gaps.

Reducing health disparities

Black Americans face significant health disparities as a result of systemic inequalities, and as a biopharmaceutical company, it is our moral obligation to do all that we can to help reduce these disparities.

Since we became a company, we have developed new medicines and treatments for diseases that disproportionately impact Black communities, including:

  • A cure for Hepatitis C, as Black men and women aged 60 and older are 10 times more likely to be chronically infected with, compared to other Americans.
  • The first oral medication for the management of heavy menstrual bleeding due to uterine fibroids. Black women suffer from a higher cumulative risk of uterine fibroids, a threefold greater incidence and relative risk of fibroids, and an earlier age of onset.
  • An oral treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Black patients with CLL are almost twice as likely to die from a CLL-related complication in the first 5 years after diagnosis as are Caucasian patients with CLL.

But we are far from finished. We are working to develop new treatments that will significantly advance the standard of care for a number of diseases.