In an effort to widen the conversation around low representation of black professionals in tech ecosystems around the country, Chicago-based Black Tech Mecca is launching its DREAM (Data Rules Everything Around Me) Tour, kicking off the first event in Chicago Thursday night.
Black Tech Mecca, founded in 2015 by Fabian Elliott and Dineo Seakamela, aims to provide data to tech ecosystems that help them enhance black participation. They track metrics like career mobility and entrepreneurial density among black tech workers.
“Tech diversity across race, gender, sexual orientation and the like, is a hot topic,” said Elliott, who also works as a technical solutions consultant at Google. “It’s been red hot over the last few years and all cities are really trying to figure out how they can get more of their citizens plugged into the tech sector and be able to take advantage of it. Chicago is no different.”
Thursday’s event will be held at Google’s Chicago office in the West Loop, and will serve as an opportunity for BTM to discuss the findings of their latest report on black tech professionals in the city.
The report, released in October, gave the Chicago region a rating of “fair” when it comes to black representation in Chicago’s tech ecosystem. When compared to other U.S. cities, Chicago lags behind Atlanta, Washington, D.C. and New York. However, it is ahead of Silicon Valley, Houston and Los Angeles, the report shows.
Of the 378,000 people who work in a tech job in the Chicagoland region, only 40,000, or 9 percent, of them are black, according to the report. (For context, black people constitute 13 percent of the region’s overall workforce.) When it comes to tech founders and entrepreneurs in the area, only 2 percent are black.
And though tech employment overall is growing, the number of black people entering the field is growing at a much slower rate, the study shows. Additionally, the black people working in tech fields are often holding lower-paying jobs, like computer support workers or lab technicians, rather than higher-paid ones, such as computer programmers and software developers.
“There’s been a ton of different initiatives, from local government to corporations to nonprofits, all trying to figure out how to make Chicago’s tech ecosystem more inclusive,” Elliott said. “But leaders in Chicago’s tech ecosystem have been guilty of looking for radical new solutions when there’s actually proven successful solutions right under our noses that aren’t getting appropriately resourced and funded.”
BTM’s report showed that black students in Chicago Public Schools are underperforming in math, science and reading when compared with their peers on district and state exams. There’s many factors that contribute to lower test scores among black students, but Elliott said that there isn't enough being done to ensure all CPS students get access to computer science courses. He added that these are often the courses lacking adequate funding to ensure qualified teachers are in classrooms to teach STEM concepts. Those same classrooms are also lacking the appropriate equipment.
To help combat that problem, Google and Chance the Rapper announced in December that they were giving a $1.5 million grant to Chicago Public Schools and computer science education for students in underserved communities, particularly those on the city’s South Side.
BTM plans to discuss all this and more at the Thursday event. It will feature prominent members of Chicago’s tech and business ecosystems, including Andrea Zopp and Jimmy Odom from World Business Chicago, Jason Johnson, founder of Konveau and director of the Chicago Urban League’s Entrepreneurship Center, and Brenda Darden Wilkerson, president and CEO of AnitaB.org.
Chicago is the first stop on the tour, and the founders said they have plans for events in other cities throughout the year, though they wouldn’t disclose which specific cities they’ll be going to. The tour is sponsored by Google, NBC Comcast Universal and Wintrust Financial, among others.
“It’s going to allow us to go into different markets and have very localized conversations about the dynamics in their ecosystem,” Seakamela said. “We’re using the tour as that platform to launch research and dialogue around what’s happening in different cities in the U.S.”
