Diversity and Inclusion at Code for America: Annual Report 2018

While diversity has always been important to our organization, last year we added structure to Code for America’s commitment to hiring a diverse workforce so that we could continue to grow the organization in a manner consistent with our values. Building a diverse workforce and ensuring an inclusive culture has no endpoint; it is the constant work of running an organization that strives to reach its full potential.

Gender

Code for America is a majority-women organization. At Code for America, we are organized into three departments: Programs, Operations, and Product & Technology. We have elected to break out our numbers somewhat differently, however, to highlight engineering specifically as an area where people of color, women, and non-binary people are typically quite underrepresented.

We’re proud of our progress in building a diverse engineering team over the past year, a time in which we have grown our staff from 5 to 17 engineers, 47.1% of whom identify as women or non-binary.

Code for America is also a women-led organization. Women make up 75% of leadership (Directors and above), 66% of the executive team, and 57% of our board.

Race and ethnicity

Overall, 40% of our workforce identify as people of color, compared to 39% in the national census and 63% in the Bay Area, and ranging by department from 30% in Engineering to 50% in Product & Design.

Our biggest gap as compared to US census benchmarks is in our Latinx representation, where we are overall 6.5 percentage points below the national average. Compared to Bay Area demographics, our Asian representation is most disparate, given 28% of Bay Area residents identify as Asian compared to 6% nationally and 8.2% at Code for America.

Our biggest opportunity for improvement is to grow representation of minority groups at the most senior levels of the organization. Amongst our Junior and Intermediate employees, who typically have 0-5 years of work experience and are not in people management roles, 47.8% identify as people of color.

At Senior levels, where employees typically have greater than 5 years of experience and are either senior individual contributors or people managers, 42.3% identify as people of color. However, only 16.6% of leadership in Director positions and above identify as people of color.

The strong representation we see at Junior, Intermediate, and Senior levels in the organization is a reflection of the investment we’ve made in recruiting and hiring of underrepresented groups, including this year’s apprenticeship program.

Improving representation at the leadership level is a clear opportunity, and in 2019 we plan to invest in retaining and growing our Junior, Intermediate, and Senior staff while also hiring underrepresented candidates directly into leadership roles.

Intersectionality

People experience bias and disadvantage in different ways based on the intersection of their various social identities. We strive to understand and provide transparency into the representation of these intersectional identities at Code for America. Because we are a majority-women organization, representation of those intersectional identities is more in line with the national average than it is for men at Code for America. In mapping our staff demographics this way, we see opportunities to be more representative of both the Bay Area and the nation going forward.