Diversity — and diversity data — elusive for cities and towns
Photo | TMS Aerial Solutions
Downtown Worcester
A few months ago, amid nationwide protests around racial injustice and police brutality, Lowell residents came to the City Council with a complaint: The makeup of City Hall did not represent the makeup of the diverse Mill City, they said.
"The workforce of the city of Lowell does not reflect the city's population," resident Sue Kim told the council in June, according to The Lowell Sun.
In a unanimous vote, the council directed the city manager to explore a third-party audit of the city's human resources department, with a focus on hiring and recruitment practices, diversity and inclusion policies and a demographic breakdown of city employees, among other topics.
But now, roughly three months later, the potential audit is in limbo, as the responses to the city's request for proposals were too costly, City Manager Eileen Donoghue wrote to city councilors in a memo last month.
With issues of equity at the forefront of the national conversation, there is new scrutiny on representation in industries across both the public and private sector, prompting conversations like these in many communities. But the question of exactly how diverse Massachusetts city and town halls are is not an easy one to answer, which some officials say is an obstacle to progress.
An Incomplete Picture
Though Massachusetts municipalities with more than 100 employees are required to report demographic statistics to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission every two years, there is no comprehensive, centralized state database tracking municipal workforce diversity.
The most complete data available comes from a report released by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in July, which examined the demographics of municipal employees in 164 cities and towns in Greater Boston. The study found that municipal workers there are "overwhelmingly whiter and older" than the communities they serve, while people of Asian and Latinx backgrounds are frequently underrepresented in comparison to their share of the population.
Not including school and library positions, women are also underrepresented, at 41 percent of municipal positions compared to 43 percent of the civilian workforce. The starkest disparity is in the public safety sector — an estimated 78 percent of law enforcement workers and 84 percent of firefighters in the region are white males, according to the report, though that group only comprises about 35 percent of the region's population overall.
According to research manager Jessie Partridge Guerrero, the research also revealed that only a handful of communities make this type of demographic information publicly available, and one of the report's recommendations is that communities collect and publish this type of data on a regular basis.
"Obviously, as the intermediary, we are interested in being able to analyze and research the data for all the municipalities in our region and in the state, but also, municipalities collecting this data on their own is just kind of a statement that they're actually interested in improving the conditions of their employment," Partridge Guerrero said.
Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, said most communities already do so, but compiling that information in one place is easier said than done.
"It's important that residents see themselves in their own local governments, and this is an area where communities are devoting more and more time to developing strategies and plans," Beckwith said. "There's not a lot of information out there, not a lot of demographic information. The MMA, as a nonprofit organization, just doesn't have the resources to conduct a census of the municipal workforce.â€
Arlington Town Manager Adam Chapdelaine said he would like to see reporting of this type of information become a state requirement for municipalities, and noted that the town already tracks its workforce demographics through its employment software.
"There's an old saying that I didn't make up that says if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And I think that applies here," Chapdelaine told the News Service. "If we individually as communities don't have data, but certainly if we collectively don't have data that can be easily compared community to community, it's going to be hard to track progress."
Excluding the school department, 91 percent of municipal workers in Arlington self-identify as white, according to Chapdelaine, while nearly 3 percent are Asian, slightly more than 2 percent are Hispanic or Latinx, just under 2 percent are Black and about 0.2 percent are American Indian. About 31 percent are women and about 68% are men.
In comparison, U.S. Census data show that nearly 81 percent of Arlington's general population is white, while nearly 12 percent is Asian, about 5 percent is Hispanic or Latinx and nearly 3 percent is Black. About 53 percent of the population is female.
Having access to this information is important, Partridge Guerrero said — but it also shouldn't be where a community's efforts end.
"Just being able to understand what the demographics and the gaps actually are is just the first step," she said. "Remedying them requires both hiring and retaining workers of color and women and younger workers, but also kind of really interrogating the systemic inequities inherent in the municipal workforce as it is now."
Diversity in Practice
In Arlington, officials are attempting to put that philosophy into practice in a few ways, Chapdelaine said. The town recently hired its first coordinator of diversity, equity and inclusion, Jillian Harvey, who oversees the town's disability, human rights and rainbow commissions.
Managers and supervisory employees there are also taking part in the National League of Cities' Race, Equity And Leadership (REAL) initiative, which offers training on systemic racism and bias, including issues of housing, zoning and citizenship.
Needham Town Manager Kate Fitzpatrick said the town has been looking to surrounding communities in an attempt to diversify its applicant pool for municipal positions, but that has sometimes proved difficult because the town is not easily commutable by public transportation.
"We've really worked on this with respect to our summer help and seasonal help, because that's one way people really learn about local government and how they might want to work here," Fitzpatrick said. "In the past, seasonal help tended to be kids who live here, but we've broadened our reach to get a more diverse pool so that young people might see why this career would be interesting."
When it comes to attracting more diverse applicants for municipal positions, officials said positioning local government work as a viable career path is half the battle. That's part of the goal of Women Leading Government, a subgroup of the Massachusetts Municipal Association, which provides networking, training and mentorship for women in the municipal space.
"We really strive to see, the long term, that we can attract more women into positions of management, into department head positions, and try to remove some of the barriers, whether they be perceived or real," said Julie Jacobson, a founding member of the group and town manager in Auburn. "When I say perceived, many times we hear women say, 'Well, I didn't realize I was qualified for that position. I didn't realize I could take that position and balance my family at the same time that I was a supervisor.' "
In terms of public safety positions, the MAPC report also recommends that the state take on a comprehensive review of civil service requirements, which the organization said can be a barrier to finding diverse applicants. The town of Westwood successfully negotiated with its unions to remove them from civil service for exactly that reason, according to Town Administrator Christopher Coleman.
Coleman said there are resources available in Massachusetts to support municipal employees from underrepresented groups, such as those offered by the Boston chapter of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators. But he said he would also like to see a more centralized way to access those resources and share them between organizations and communities.
"With me being a person of color, if I go into an environment that has very few, let's say, a limited diverse workforce, not everyone's going to know the resources that may be available to someone at my age, at that point in my life, being an African American," Coleman said.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments