Advancing Equity Through “Deeper” Data and Engagement

Marty Miles, Senior Policy Associate, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW)

May 05, 2022

“When working on equity, it’s important for staff to stay rooted in the data and to acknowledge the realities revealed, even when they cause discomfort.”

— Julia Hillengas, Executive Director, PowerCorpsPHL

Many organizations are making thoughtful commitments to increasing equity in their operations and in their strategies. But making that commitment real through changed organizational practice is the more difficult work. Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW) is excited about how local workforce service providers like PowerCorpsPHL are doing just that — using disaggregated data and customer/participant engagement to improve the equity of their outcomes.

PowerCorpsPHL offers AmeriCorps work crew opportunities for unemployed or underemployed young adults in Philadelphia. After 17 weeks of training and outdoor crew participation, members can obtain further education, credentials, and work experience in the green infrastructure, electrical, solar, or urban forestry areas as preparation for jobs in those industries.

A leadership team from PowerCorpsPHL was part of a two-year Workforce Learning Community led by CSW’s Improving Practices & Outcomes team in partnership with the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey and Race Forward. The partnership supported a cohort of 16 United Way grantees in producing better and more equitable results through workshops, peer learning forums, and individualized technical assistance.

CSW brought a decade of experience helping community-based service providers improve their outcomes through its national Workforce Benchmarking Network continuous improvement process. Race Forward added critical insights about the importance of using data and community engagement to understand how systemic and structural racism contributes to inequitable results.

Disaggregating overall data — by looking at specific results for a variety of sub-groups, to identify any differences between them — was key to this work! While Workforce Learning Community members already primarily served persons of color, it was essential that they “go deeper” to understand how other social categorizations such as gender, class, or justice-involved backgrounds were interconnected and could impact economic outcomes. The question was not only which sub-groups were being served, but which were staying engaged and succeeding and which were struggling and not reaching their goals. Then, feedback from those participants and partners could provide further critical data about what contributing factors or root causes might be.

PowerCorpsPHL already knew they were recruiting fewer women than men, and that a lower percentage of women than men were completing the initial work crew phase. They decided to dive deeper into their data to understand the gender-specific issues contributing to lower outcomes with young women of color. Disaggregated data helped them answer these key questions:

• Recruitment: How many women are referred by existing community partners, and how many make it through each stage of the application process (compared to men)?
• Program retention: For each training cycle, how many women completed the program’s first phase — and how did their program’s “dismissal” rate compare to that for men?
• Employment: What industries are women entering post-program, including the targeted “green” industries — and how do women’s wages at hire compare to those of men?

With bar graphs and charts and other visualizations using disaggregated data spanning several cohorts, PowerCorpsPHL now had evidence about where women of color struggled to succeed throughout the program, from recruitment to job placement. Engaging applicants, participants, staff, and partners through focus groups and interviews helped the team better understand the stories behind the data. Four primary “influencing factors” emerged:

• PowerCorpPHL’s public image and history with referral partners supported the recruitment of men more than women;
• Women cohort members and staff were more exposed to harassment and gender-based discrimination within the program context;
• Women members were held to higher disciplinary standards than men; and
• Women felt discouraged from going into certain industries for their second-phase work experience and employment.

PowerCorpsPHL staff are staying “rooted in the data,” as they have difficult but important conversations about their own culture and practices, says Matt Woodruff, Data and Operations Manager. The team continues to implement new strategies to address these influencing factors, including:

• A focus on their own staffing structure and recruitment and hiring processes, including placing more women in crew leader or assistant crew leader positions;
• Deeper engagement with community partner organizations that are led by Black women and have a strong record of employing and retaining Black women, as well as with Black women working in PowerCorpsPHL’s target industries — which has strengthened recruitment and placement networks; and
• Internal gender-specific affinity groups that allow both female and male members to discuss personal and program issues they are experiencing and get the support they need.

The results? With these strategies, supported by an increase in the program’s training stipend, female representation in PowerCorpsPHL’s cohorts has risen from 20% initially to as high as 36% in the past two years. For the first time, women have begun to obtain critical apprenticeship positions with the local water company. Staff continue to use their data, stakeholder feedback, and targeted partnerships to improve the program completion rate for women, address disparities between men’s and women’s placement wages, and to ensure that they also reach women who are returning citizens (a key part of PowerCorpsPHL’s mission).

The PowerCorpsPHL team believes their work on disaggregating data and engaging stakeholders to understand equity factors is essential to their mission and success. Woodruff goes on to say, “While we might have looked at some aspects of race and gender, the Workforce Learning Community’s tools and activities propelled us to go deep to really understand what was happening — and provided the accountability we needed to do the work.”

It’s never been more important for the workforce development sector to hold itself accountable to collecting and using disaggregated data to ensure that all job seekers are successfully progressing toward economic mobility in a way that’s equitable. While progress is being made by organizations like PowerCorpsPHL, there is more work to do!

For example, disaggregated outcome data is also a key part of the Workforce Benchmarking Network national survey, which is now accepting data on program services, participants, and outcomes on an ongoing basis. Programs are asked to provide recent outcome data disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and gender, if possible. In the most recent submissions in 2019 and 2020, only 69% of the 91 respondents were able to report disaggregated job placement data by gender, and 57% were able to disaggregate placements by race. For those reporting wage at hire, 62% could provide disaggregated data by gender, and only 52% could report by race. These numbers need to continue rising for the workforce field to be able to know if we’re truly addressing equity issues within our own system and to model what’s needed across others.

The Workforce Benchmarking Network learning cohorts and the larger CSW Improving Practices & Outcomes strategy area aim to strengthen the capacity of workforce professionals to produce better and more equitable results for job seekers and employers. To learn more about this aspect of CSW’s work or the national data survey, contact Chioke Mose-Telesford at cmosetelesford@skilledwork.org or visit our website.