With a $50 million investment from the Melinda Gates-founded Pivotal Ventures, the Gender Equality in Tech (GET) Cities initiative has officially begun in Chicago. The goal of the initiative is to maximize the impact of local women-in-tech efforts by bringing together key stakeholders and creating collaborative models that can be replicated in other hubs and cities.
Pivotal Ventures sees the problem as two-fold: 1) women are chronically underrepresented in today’s tech workforce and 2) tech innovation has previously been disproportionally concentrated in select metro areas.
Today, women hold only 26 percent of computing jobs in tech, even less in fast-growing industries such as artificial intelligence. Black women make up 3 percent of the workforce and Hispanic women make up only 1 percent despite being a combined 16 percent of the general population.
Between 2015 and 2017, five metro areas accounted for more than 90% of the United States’ tech growth, meaning tech investments, startups and large companies are concentrated in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose and San Diego. The West Coast has a particular hold over tech, especially given the famous Silicon Valley. However, a shift in this trend looks imminent. While the top 5 metros saw huge increases, 31 of the largest 100 metros in the nation managed to increase their share of the tech sector during those two years.
Thus, location is a critical component of the GET Cities initiative—Chicago was not chosen as the first city at random. In fact, Pivotal Ventures led an analysis of emerging tech centers in the U.S., which included factors such as current and future sources of diverse talent, computing degree programs and industry, access to capital, strength of local business and employer community, and the regulatory and political environment.
“As a Midwest destination for many large, technology companies and home to an increasing number of [venture capital] firms supporting local startups, Chicago is ideally suited for a collaborative stakeholder effort to advance women in tech alongside existing efforts,” reads a press release announcing the initiative. Additional cities will be carefully selected and announced over the course of the next several years.
For example, GET Cities is working with P33, an organization dedicated to transforming Chicago into a tier one technology and innovation hub while promoting inclusive economic growth. For GET Cities, these types of partnerships are invaluable as they help attract additional funders and foster local coordination that can accelerate the pace of women-in-tech efforts. In addition to the current workforce, GET Cities is also looking to engage with the future workforce. After all, the heartbeat of local tech is often the surrounding universities. Supporting women who are taking their first college tech class is just as important as working with a current leader.
GET Cities is a city-specific initiative that is part of Melinda Gates’ larger plan to “accelerate the pace of change for women by 2030 through advancing women’s power and influence in the U.S.”