Women and racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in leadership roles with public transit agencies, research from the Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) at San Jose State University, while there is an overconcentration of workers of color in operational roles.
“The extreme staffing shortages within the transit industry have created an unusually good opportunity for operators to successfully improve their workforce diversity,” Dr. Asha Weinstein Agrawal, the study’s principal investigator, said. “Important strategies for recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce include marketing strategies that promote the diverse careers available in public transit, revising job descriptions to be more inclusive, family-friendly work schedules for operations staff, ongoing professional development opportunities that target employees in every job classification, and fostering strong executive-level support for diversity programs.”
The report, Understanding Workforce Diversity in the Transit Industry: Establishing a Baseline of Diversity Demographics, identifies barriers and promising practices for diversifying the work force and provides statistics on racial/ethnic and gender diversity in the transit agency work force. from 2018 to 2022.
Key findings include 71 percent of the transit workforce is male, 64 percent of workers are non-white. Black employees comprised workers 40 percent of the transit work force despite being only 12 percent of the U.S. labor force.