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Q&A
Challenges and strategies in diversifying high-paying job groups
0:44:22
·
3 min
Council Member Farah N. Louis questions why agencies have struggled to make significant progress in diversifying high-paying job groups. DCAS representatives Katrina Porter and Silvia Montalban discuss various strategies and efforts to address this issue.
- Multiple factors contribute to the slow progress, requiring a multi-faceted approach.
- DCAS is working on transparency, information sharing, and coordination with agency partners.
- Efforts include examination schedules, training programs, career counseling, and workforce metrics reviews.
- Local Law 14 has led to gradual improvements in hiring women for traditionally male-dominated roles.
Farah N. Louis
0:44:22
Why do you think agencies have been unable to make more significant progress in diversifying high paying job groups despite long standing awareness of these disparities and that leads to the pay equity analysis, but why do you think that that's?
Katrina Porter
0:44:37
So I'm you know I think it's many different factors that come into play and you know I think that with DCAS you know working to be more transparent and share information about opportunities, about training, about our examination schedule with agency, with our agency partners that will help you know in the long run.
0:44:57
You know this this situation wasn't created you know in a day and it's going to take time for us to address some of the the issues that are you know being revealed in the reports that you're reviewing.
0:45:09
What
Farah N. Louis
0:45:10
would you say is like lack of coordination?
Katrina Porter
0:45:11
No, think that we're working toward you know, we're working toward addressing these issues in many different ways.
0:45:19
So it's the examination schedule, our interaction with our agency partners, training, know, new learning and development system, the professional development trainings that are offered through our learning and development team and career counseling, which is one of the efforts that just that were just came out of the City Council.
0:45:42
I think all of these things together will help us to address some of these issues.
Silvia Montalban
0:45:48
And I would like to add that there are other measures of course that we continuously reinforce the agencies to use.
0:45:54
These are tools and approaches such as reviewing their workforce metrics periodically.
0:45:59
Actually on a quarterly basis and they're required to make these assessments, put it in their quarterly reports.
0:46:04
They review the underutilization and job groupings that are relevant to their agencies so that they can strategize for effective outreach so that they can recruit and enrich their applicant pools where there is underutilization and underrepresentation of certain demographics.
0:46:21
So that is a continuous reinforcement.
0:46:24
I'd also like to mention that Local Law 14 actually is also requires agencies actually to make available fair and effective employment opportunities to women and people of color.
0:46:38
And resulting from that we've seen that there is a gradual impact on addressing things such as occupational segregation for women.
0:46:46
So for example, I'd just like to mention that there are certain categories of titles where there has been an increment in the hiring of women for FY '23, for example.
0:46:56
In the last report, It increased from 28% to 33% in protective service work.
0:47:02
There has also been several increases as well in the areas of service and maintenance and technicians.
0:47:11
So the hiring of women has gradually increased and it's important to note that because even though there are sometimes as you mentioned maybe attrition, it is a bit offset by the efforts that we continuously make with agencies to make opportunities available for women in in areas where they're underrepresented.