It also helps to have a diverse well-educated populace with easy access to inexpensive and comprehensive public transportation...for those who may actually care about doing something meaningful in the public policy realm. JL
Sam Machkovetch reports in ars technica:
Higher diversity stats in New York City, compared to numbers published by major Silicon Valley firms, is a result of "key growth areas like e-commerce drawing on traditional sectors that are more diverse."
Companies like Google, Apple, Intel, and Yahoo have been relatively forthright about their diversity hiring numbers, particularly in the form of reports that reveal lower representations of women and minorities in those companies' tech-specific fields. But those studies only speak to one company at a time—what about a study that pools from federal or state statistics on tech-sector employment?
Thanks to data made available by New York's Federal Reserve Bank, the Center for an Urban Future published its own state-specific report on Thursday. It's pretty broad, parsing 2014 employment numbers at all companies who use "technology as their core business strategy." In some cases, the report also compares those figures to similar data from 2004. The biggest takeaway was greater representation of women in tech in New York City than at any of the aforementioned major tech companies.
The total tally, according to the CUF, is 40 percent, and the report goes further than listing a "tech/non-tech" split of genders. The report's numbers have been broken down into seven discrete categories—computer manufacturing, systems design, data processing/hosting, electronic shopping, publishing/broadcasting, scientific R&D, and software publishing—and it shows women dominating the R&D category at 59 percent while lagging in the software publishing sector at only 32 percent.
The study also broke down employment numbers by ethnicity, which counted 62 percent whites and 16 percent Asians across that entire seven-category range of tech companies, leaving 11 percent Hispanic, 9 percent black, and a 1-percent sliver of "other." Again, the CUF further broke down those stats by categories: Hispanic workers stood out as 23 percent of the computer manufacturing sector while African-American workers had their highest percentage, 16 percent, in R&D.
The CUF didn't go so far as to make statements about what the numbers mean or any connections to trends in hiring or education, but a report by Crain's New York guessed that the overall higher diversity stats in New York City, compared to numbers published by major Silicon Valley firms, is a result of "key growth areas like e-commerce drawing on traditional sectors that are more diverse." We hope this study spurs other diversity reports to include similar, more discrete category splits, so that the data fueling such an east coast/west coast feud could feel more concrete.Borough-by-borough stats were included as well. These may not interest the rest of the nation as much—unless they want to make jokes about Brooklyn hipsters accelerating that borough's tech-sector growth by 83 percent between 2004 and 2014.
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