GET Cities Catalyzes a Community-Led Future for Tech Equity
There is no sector of the modern economy that technology does not touch. Its pervasive influence shapes everything from healthcare and transportation to the way humans communicate and connect with each other. And yet, for all its ubiquitousness, the tech industry is remarkably inaccessible to the majority of people.
The industry’s current systems of power deliberately exclude entire communities of people and exacerbate existing inequities in society. This doesn’t just impact them — it hurts all of us.
By 2030, the global talent shortage is expected to reach 85.2 million, and companies worldwide risk losing $8.4 trillion in revenue because of the lack of skilled talent.
We are currently still 100 years to gender parity in the industry; and that’s 100 years of missing the rich and varied perspectives, solutions and creativity of those being excluded to solve real problems in our society. We kicked off this work impatient to realize a world where the tech sector’s representative workforce drives innovation and economic benefits.
That’s where GET (Gender Equity in Technology) came in. Operating first in Chicago, then the DC Metro area, Miami, and nationally, GET Cities’ ultimate goals were to increase the power and influence of historically excluded people in tech so that the industry reflects and addresses the needs of all lived experiences and doesn’t miss out on important perspectives, talents and innovations.
Co-designing solutions with those most excluded in tech, we were able to curate a bottom-up approach to building and aligning the ecosystem around the real needs and solutions of those we were learning from and building with (learn more about the GET Fellows and the intervention it evolved into: GET Exploration). Within our ecosystem development framework, we worked to understand the gaps in the system and pipelines into tech at the local level, bring people and organizations together to share resources and insights, and collaborate on solutions while sharing our learnings to the broader equity in tech landscape nationally (learn more about the Big Think). This process created a collaborative, united cohort of stakeholders across cities and sectors aligned on goals, metrics, and interventions to increase equity in tech with a focus on gender.
One such cohort is the Tech Equity Working Group (TEWG), an alliance of 24 accelerators, incubators, funds, and mission-aligned ecosystem supporters in Chicago coming together to design solutions and collective infrastructure to address gender and racial inequities for tech founders in Chicago. After collaborating, testing and piloting new solutions together, the group selected 9 interventions to scale into local organizations, resulting in the deployment of nearly $2M in scaling grants from GET Cities.
Approaches like this allowed us to create actionable solutions that simultaneously addressed local needs while catalyzing a nationwide movement for increasing equity in tech.
Our mission was two-fold: to address systemic exclusion within tech ecosystems and to empower local communities to create lasting change. Through shared goals, metrics, and interventions, we aimed to cultivate diversity in tech from the ground up. We are proud to have planted seeds today that have cultivated a more diverse tech landscape for tomorrow.
GET Cities Impact & Insights
With limited resources, systemic interventions that target the ecosystem itself were crucial. Our interventions are the connection between the problems and the solutions. We designed them to address the issue, identify the right partners to co-lead with us, and measure the impact to determine if we are moving the needle.
We conducted over 37 pilot interventions, nine of which were scaled and spun out to partners who have continued to scale them on their own by building teams, bringing on additional partners and fundraising. Learn more about some of them in our report, “Building Inclusive Local Ecosystems to Accelerate Gender Equity In Tech”.
Some high-level examples of the impact and outcomes of our interventions include:
Along with creating a legacy of collaboration and ecosystem alignment, the goal of GET Cities was also to catalyze an expansive, intersectional understanding of and commitment to gender as a priority in our three hub cities and nationally. Through our convening work, more than two-thirds of our Tech Equity Working Group (TEWG) members have changed or built gender-focused programming opportunities inside their own organizations, changing cultures and creating ripple effects across the ecosystem.
We’ve also built interventions designed exclusively for forward-thinking tech leaders to build more equitable hiring and retention practices in their own workplaces (Check out the Talent Connect as part of #GETChampions). One startup cohort member has more than doubled its workforce, with 75% of the new hires identifying as women or nonbinary. Another hired over 150 people, approximately 60% of whom are women. And all of the GET Champions have shared their acquired knowledge with colleagues or network members, exponentially increasing the reach of our efforts to catalyze measurable, dedicated commitment to creating equitable and inclusive workplaces for historically excluded people in tech.
Another pilot intervention tested in the Tech Equity Working Group that is now thriving at a partner organization trains aspiring venture capitalists from marginalized populations. Now on its fifth cohort, we have enough data to show that early career women venture capitalists had portfolios of companies where 54% were founded by other women (compared to 19% nationally). This proves that aligning groups around shared goals, empowering leaders to act more equitably, and supporting historically excluded people themselves to hold power are all reliable ways to move the needle in an ecosystem.
GET Cities: Our Evolution and Our Future
Some of our greatest learnings through the design and experimentation of GET Cities have been around deferring to experts, whether in subject matter, locality, or identity. Now that the groundwork has been laid, GET Cities will begin our Transition to Community, transferring some of our team, locally thriving interventions, and working groups to three trusted partners.
Transition to Community (or “exit to community”) is a proactive and intentional step towards sustainable impact, fostering resilience within communities and encouraging strong relationships with other ecosystem innovators and funders. For GET Cities, this is an intuitive adaptation inspired by the nine successful intervention spin-outs, which are currently operating fully under partner organizations.
A true ecosystem development practice involves supporting the agency, ownership, and accountability of partners and stakeholders to steer and own the transformative journey for themselves. Our Transition to Community phase serves as the proof of success of our ecosystem approach, with the potential to provide an innovative path for growth, longevity, and sustainability far beyond our original initiative design.
Introducing Our Transition Partners
We have selected three partners to carry out the work of GET Cities through our Transition to Community. These partners will build on a portfolio of work piloted at GET Cities; continue our work of convening the ecosystem, engaging power holders, and iteration; welcome some of our GET Cities team members; and add or expand a gender lens to their ongoing work to achieve equity in tech.
National | The Last Mile Education Fund
The Last Mile Education Fund closes critical gaps in financial and career support for financially vulnerable, underrepresented college students in the “last mile” to graduation in a tech-related degree pathway, addressing both economic mobility and the diversity and talent crises in tech and tech-enabled industries.
Over the next three years, the Last Mile Education Fund and the GET Cities National Research team will build out a research arm that leverages the national ecosystem of technology’s social organizations to understand students’ progress from funding to graduation to career attainment. The research will focus on understanding the unique experiences of students at the intersection of gender, socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, and technology. Collected data will be used to inform policy and affect higher education practices.
Miami | Radical Partners
Radical Partners is a Miami-based social impact accelerator and the implementation partner for GET Champions Miami. With the Transition to Community, Radical Partners will continue the work of GET Cities by continuing the GET Champions Fellowship, which teaches local tech leaders to better hire, retain, and support women and trans people.
Radical Partners is also collaborating with Miami’s key tech networks (e.g., Black Professionals Network, Venture Café Miami, Ironhack, YWCA, Miami Dade College, Florida International University, General Assembly, Miami Tech Works, and Tech Talent Coalition) to advocate for gender equity and increase access to tech opportunities for women, trans and nonbinary people.
Finally, Radical Partners is also hosting recurring free virtual Office Hours where members of the team will provide mentorship to women, trans and nonbinary technology professionals.
Chicago | World Business Chicago
World Business Chicago (WBC) is Chicago’s leading economic development non-profit. Its mission is to drive inclusive economic growth and job creation, support businesses, and promote Chicago as the leading global city to help existing companies expand as well as attract new companies to the city.
As a result of GET Cities’ Transition to Community, World Business Chicago is creating a new Gender Equity Office for the region. This office is responsible for ensuring that all economic activities center gender justice as a throughline.
WBC will continue the work convening the Tech Equity Working Group (entrepreneurship) and Tech Equity Network (workforce), largely focused around the topic of engaging further regionally and across industry.
GET Cities legacy
A legacy isn’t just in what you’ve done, but what you leave behind. We want to emphasize the wealth of research, insights, and best practices that GET Cities has compiled and continue to make them accessible for ongoing use and inspiration in the pursuit of tech equity. We recently released such a compilation with “Building Inclusive Local Ecosystems to Accelerate Gender Equity In Tech”, and we will be publishing additional methodology resources, research, and spotlights on our partners. Stay tuned on our website getcities.org and on our social channels (@getcities) as we keep the conversation going in the next few months.
Although GET Cities as an initiative is shifting out of the spotlight, the mission of expanding the power and influence of historically excluded people in technology fiercely remains and grows with our partners and the newly strengthened ecosystem itself.
