December 29, 2016
The city of Philadelphia unveiled Thursday its first report detailing the racial and gender makeup of its municipal workforce.
Mayor Jim Kenney stressed the importance of cultivating a diverse workforce when his administration created the city's Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which released the 2016 Workforce Profile Report.
“The creation of this report is unprecedented in that we now have a clear sense of where we are, which is essential to figuring out what we need to do in order to get where we want to be,” Kenney said.
The report reveals that new hires by the Kenney administration reflect the demographics of the city, but non-whites are underrepresented in jobs that earn more than $90,000 annually and Hispanic/Latino employees are underrepresented throughout the workforce.
“While there is some encouraging news," Kenney said. "It is clear we still have a long way to go to make the city government look like the citizens it serves.”
First, the city's workforce is predominantly male. Despite women making up 53 percent of the Philly population, only 38 percent of the city's workforce is female. However, officials point out that women account for 57 percent of the city's department heads.
The report also reveals that city employees who identified as white or black/African American were slightly overrepresented at the expense of Hispanic/Latino and Asian workers.
The city's workforce is mostly black/African American (50.2 percent), 40 percent white, 6 percent Hispanic/Latino and 3 percent Asian. That differs somewhat to the city's population, which consists of 44 percent black/African American, 35 percent white, 14 percent Hispanic/Latino and 7 percent Asian.
When examining jobs that earn more than $90,000 annually, the report found that 61 percent of those workers are white.
Nolan Atkinson, the city's chief diversity and inclusion officer, indicated that the report is an "essential step" to improving the workforce.
“The hard work now begins: making sure there is a talented pool of diverse candidates when there are vacancies in exempt positions and utilizing best practices including diverse interview teams in the interviewing and selection process,” Atkinson said.
The Mayor's Office said an investigation is underway into potential barriers that prevent certain candidates from seeking municipal jobs.
The Office of Diversity and Inclusion will provide workforce data annually.
