Tech inclusion tracker expands its scope

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Nick Wakeman By Nick Wakeman,
Editor-in-Chief, Washington Technology

By Nick Wakeman

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The Tech Inclusion Tracker has opened its aperture beyond conferences to now also look at diversity and inclusion at boards of directors, TV shows and agency leadership.

The Tech Inclusion Tracker I wrote about last week has upped its game and the scrutiny it is focusing on the government technology industry.

The tracker started by measuring the number Black and women experts that were speakers at government technology events and comparing those to U.S. population data. The U.S. population is 51 percent women and 13 percent Black.

Now they’ve added trackers for the racial and gender make up of boards of directors of government contracting companies. Also now on the tracker are the makeup of federal government leadership, and the breakdown of the race and gender of guests on the Government Matters TV program.

It’s quite impressive. Whoever is producing the tracker is letting the data speak for itself.

The Twitter feed is very active in calling out specific events and webcasts. If the speaker mix falls below the demographics benchmark, they call out the event with a red block that says “This Conference Should Be More Inclusive.”

Events that exceed the U.S. demographics get a green block that says, “This Conference is Inclusive.”

For example, this is what FCW’s Digital Government Summit received:

Then there are those events or webcasts that come close. They get a yellow block that says “This Conference is Meh Inclusive.” That one is kind of my favorite because Meh is funny to me.

I found the company index intriguing. I don’t know if they looked at the story I did on the leadership of the Washington Technology Top 100 last year on the racial and gender make-up of the leaders of the Top 100 companies. But they working on a similar idea and are presenting it graphically in a way I never did. I wish I had thought of it.

The conclusion you can draw from both my story and now their index is that the industry has a long way to go. There are bright spots for sure, but women executives are under-represented and the numbers are woeful for Black leaders.

The Tech Inclusion Tracker looks at 32 Top 100 companies and only Science Applications International Corp. meets the demographic goal for women. Half of SAIC's board is comprised of women. But SAIC has no Black executives on their board.

CACI International (20 percent), Accenture (17 percent), Deloitte (20 percent), ManTech International (13 percent), T-Rex Consulting (18 percent), and Blue Tech Inc. (33 percent) all meet or exceed the tracker’s 13 percent goal for Blacks. For T-Rex and Blue Tech, the tracker looked at the makeup of their leadership because board data was unavailable.

Twelve of the 32 companies listed on the tracker had zero Blacks on their boards. Two companies had no women or Blacks on their boards -- Smartronix, and American Systems.

I hope they add more companies to the tracker but I know how much work it is to dig through all of those websites.

The Tracker also looks at the Government Matters TV program under a section called TV Still Matters.

Only 3 percent of the shows guests were Black in January. Six percent have been Black so far in February. Women have represented 39 percent of guests for both months.

I do wish I knew who was doing the Tracker. Even still, it is an impressive piece of work as the data speaks for itself.

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