It’s simple.Tolerant regions attract talent. All kinds of talent: immigrant, African American, young, gay, female, etc. Talented and skilled regions move to the front, while others stay stagnant or fall behind.
For this week’s “By the Numbers,” we take a look at females and the creative class. This measure is strong on many levels. It measures half the labor force – female vs. male – and has an underlying assumption/ evaluation of tolerance. We would bet: regions with a higher percentage of female creative class members have a more tolerant environment than others.
What’s our data source? Rather than utilizing the typical BLS occupational data, we used census occupational data from the American Community Survey. Unfortunately, the Census didn’t create occupational estimates for all metros, but we have the rankings for the metros that were included.
In addition to female creative class members, we also include the rankings – top and bottom metros – for female educational attainment (% of population). Check the numbers out!
Download By The Numbers: Females and the Creative Class
posted by Steven
March 29th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Intresting: some clarification / definitions required I think. Does the first graph mean that 25% of the creative class is female, or that 25% of women in the labour force are in creative occupations.
Either way, that number seems low given that 55% of both undergrad and masters degrees now go to females.
March 29th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Wendy asked the first question I had: what are these percentages?
If you’re going to do something called “By the Numbers” regularly, it would help to explain what the numbers are.
Of course, whether these numbers are percentage of women in the creative class or percentage of the creative class that’s women, the larger point is still missing: and this tells us what, exactly? The answer to life is 42?
March 29th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Wendy:
Thanks for the question. The percentages represent the percentage of the workforce that is female creative class members.
For example,
In Washington, DC 23% of the workforce are female creative class members.
March 29th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
All- 23 percent of the workforce is creative class women. That’s sounds really good. My guess is that 40 percent of the DC workforce is creative class, which would mean women make up more than half.
Steven – do you have handy the women as percent of creative class share? BTW, very nice work on the GWI, Greater Washington Talent study!
March 30th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Thanks Steven, that makes more sense. As Richard said, if 23% are women and 40% are creative class then more women than men are creative class, which correlates somewhat to university graduation rates between the sexes.