As part of its ongoing efforts to improve diversity and equity within its workforce, the City of Sacramento has launched a new gender and ethnic diversity dashboard.
The City Auditor partnered with the Information Technology Department to create the online dashboard, which allows the public to search and sort various data sets related the City’s employees. Categories include age, ethnicity, gender, department, job title and salary. The public also can filter by year, with the data going back to 2016.
“This powerful dashboard provides an online progress report for the City’s ongoing diversity and equity efforts,” said City Auditor Jorge Oseguera. “I am proud of the effort and work that our team put into compiling meaningful data that the public can access.”
“The City clearly is committed to creating an unprecedented level of transparency and accountability,” said Chief Information Officer Maria MacGunigal. “The new dashboard makes complex information easy to understand and available to a wide audience.”
The City of Sacramento’s goal is to have its workforce essentially mirror the demographics of the city itself. In addition to the progress tracked via the dashboard, the City also releases an annual “Ethnicity & Gender Diversity Report,” which provides an update of its ongoing efforts to improve its hiring practices and better reflect the community it serves. The City also recently held its first “Women in the Workplace: Gender Equity, Diversity & Inclusion” event at City Hall.
The new dashboard currently will be updated annually. However, updates could become more frequent — such as quarterly — in the future, officials said.
“This dashboard is definitely a step in the right direction,” said Aimée Zenzele Barnes, the City’s diversity and equity manager. “It will hold the City accountable by being publicly transparent about our accomplishments, challenges and the work ahead.”
Better data collection is just one of the strategies the City is utilizing to improve diversity and equity among its employees. In direct collaboration with the Human Resources department, Barnes and a citywide work group in 2018 began drafting a new Recruitment & Hiring Manual for the City that provides consistent policy interpretation, accountability and implementation of practices for the recruitment and hiring of employees. The manual will be completed in the coming months with staff training to follow.