In a recent piece called “Las Vegas Is A Great Place To Be A Woman In Tech“, Ariel Schwartz, a Senior Editor at Co.Exist, look at the cities that have the best gender diversity for women in technology.
“As recent employee data from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo has confirmed, there is a serious lack of diversity in the tech industry. But for women who want to work in tech, some cities appear to be more welcoming than others,” she writes in the post. “Business intelligence firm RJMetrics recently analyzed data from the site Meetup to figure out which cities have the most women in tech and what the rest of the country might learn from them.”
“Using Meetup’s open API, RJMetrics broke down the makeup of the largest tech-related Meetup group in each of the 50 largest cities in the U.S. An obvious caveat: Their study was not at all a comprehensive measurement of gender diversity in the industry, but it can at least provide a general glance at geographic differences,” she continues.
RJMetrics estimates the tech community is 29% female. As you can see from the list that beat that average, Las Vegas is the only city where women appear to make up the majority of the tech community.
“Why is Las Vegas so female-friendly compared to every other big city? RJMetrics speculates that it might have something to do with the fact that a female mayor has presided over the city since 2011,” Ariel Schwartz writes. “As it turns out, a sizable number of other cities with better than average numbers of women in tech also have female mayors. After running a regression analysis on the 50 largest cities in the U.S., RJMetrics found that this isn’t just a coincidence: a female mayor is positively correlated with having more women in the local tech sector, though the reason for this correlation isn’t really clear.”
Read the entire piece on FastCoExist.com here.
