Dashboard helps city track diversity, equity, inclusion progress
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Philadelphia’s workforce diversity dashboard collects and visualizes demographic data on city employees.
In a push toward greater diversity in government agencies, Philadelphia recently released an interactive dashboard that displays racial, ethnic, gender and salary data on the city’s workforce.
The workforce diversity dashboard builds upon the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’s annual workforce report and visualizes the data in an accessible and user-friendly way. It features information on employee age and salary and GIS data showing where staff live at the ZIP code level, officials said in an announcement. The tool was developed in a collaboration among ODEI, the Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT) and the Office of Human Resources.
“The dashboard allows City leaders to understand our diversity trends and to assess the performance of the City's recruitment and retention policies,” Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer Josie B. H. Pickens said in an email. “Moreover, to create cultures of safety and belonging, it is imperative for the City to understand the characteristics of its workforce.”
The tool includes aggregated data from HR, which is collected throughout employees’ tenure and updates as their information changes. No personally identifiable information is gathered during the process or shown on the dashboard. To avoid security and performance issues, an automated process uploads HR’s information to a database that OIT has read-only access to but can transfer the data to the office’s central database. From there, data is published to an ArcGis Online platform to create visualizations, Kistine Carolan, OIT’s senior program manager, said.
The workforce diversity dashboard improves cross-agency efficiency, eliminating the need for multiple agencies to chase down the same data through emails, Carolan said. For the public, open data increases transparency of city government processes and accountability. It also “extend[s] the mileage of data so that researchers, journalists, students, activists [and] community leaders can use it for the higher good in a lot of different use cases,” she said.
Self-service is another benefit to the publicly available dashboard and data. “If [residents] have a question on anything really—that has data available—they can go and figure it out for themselves,” said Charlotte Shade, program manager of renewable energy at the Office of Sustainability. Shade was previously lead GIS analyst at OIT, where she helped design the dashboard.
The dashboard is updated on a monthly basis, except for data on age, ZIP code and salary, which updates annually July 1. Certain elected offices not under the mayoral administration—such as city council, the sheriff’s office, the district attorney’s office and others—are excluded from the dashboard because HR does not have direct control over those hires.
“The dashboard is a concrete action that demonstrates that the City is serious about equity and diversity within city government—tracking data is a vital first and continual step to making any change,” Pickens said.