Giving Compass' Take:
- An article at Brookings highlights a St. Louis-based organization's successes in bridging the COVID-widened tech employment gap.
- How has the pandemic exposed already deeply embedded gaps in workforce equity, especially in STEM fields? How can we apply this organization's model in driving for further equity in tech occupations?
- Read about how the tech industry has begun to make strides in equitable employment for transgender workers.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
During the pandemic, the employment gap between Black and Hispanic Americans and white Americans reached record highs. They were the first fired and the last hired. At the same time, while the technology sector is struggling to fill 410,000 open computing jobs nationwide, only around 72,000 computer science graduates will enter the workforce this year. Yet, widened by the pandemic, the technological skills gap in computer science—which disproportionately impacts Black and Hispanic individuals—continues to grow. Of projected computer science graduates, less than 20% are women, less than 8% are Black, and less than 9% are Hispanic.
While many companies have expressed a willingness to move towards more equity-focused hiring practices, this is not enough to break the cycle of exclusion. Employers tend to look to higher education institutions to find high-skilled candidates, especially in STEM fields, yet structural barriers often exclude people of color from entering higher education. In response, technology boot camps and other re-skilling programs have emerged as alternative routes to building in-demand technical skills.
However, due to inadequate recruitment and retention strategies in many boot camps, as well as implicit and explicit biases in employment practices, people of color still face barriers in gaining access to and benefitting from these programs. Recognizing this shortcoming, LaunchCode, a St. Louis-based technology training organization, implemented a new model for equitable re-skilling by combining computer science training with a paid apprenticeship and by altering its recruitment and retention efforts. We partnered with LaunchCode to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts in increasing equity in program admission and persistence. Below, we find that LaunchCode was able to increase the share of women, persons of color, and individuals with less coding experience in their cohorts, and by doing so diversify the technology workforce in St. Louis.
Read the full article about the tech employment gap at Brookings.