Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Journey

Our efforts to grow a more inclusive and diverse team are beginning to show success. For example, 13 summer fellows have joined Mathematica as staff after completing their dissertations. When we introduced concerted efforts to diversify incoming talent in 2015, 75 percent of our U.S.-based staff—and 84 percent of senior staff—identified as White. Today, fewer staff identify as White—69 percent of all U.S.-based staff and 82 percent of senior staff.

In 2021, 23 percent of all staff we hired for U.S. positions identified as Black or Latinx/Hispanic, compared with 17 percent in 2020. Among senior staff hired in 2021, 25 percent identified as Black or Latinx/Hispanic, compared with 13 percent in 2020. And although representation of veterans and people with disabilities in our workforce is still too low, we have increased the number of hires in both categories and continue to work to develop effective hiring strategies and build relationships with organizations that can help with recruitment. But diversifying our incoming talent is only part of Mathematica’s approach for building DEI within our organization. Ensuring a positive experience and a greater sense of inclusion and equity among our colleagues is essential for retaining staff and is our focus moving forward.

Women make up more than two-thirds of Mathematica’s overall staff and senior leadership team. More than half of Mathematica’s board of directors are women; people of color make up nearly 30 percent of the board.

We learned from our first organizational culture survey in 2015 that staff satisfaction with their supervisors and access to mentors differed by race, ethnicity, and other demographics. In response, we implemented the following changes to foster a more inclusive work culture:

• Employee Experience Council. The charge of the Employee Experience Council (formerly the Diversity Council) is to support the improvement of the employee experience, in alignment with our DEI priorities and goals, and the quality of our products by bringing a DEI lens to our internal procedures, our public face, and our daily interactions. To achieve this, the Council will serve as an advisory group, innovation hub, and think tank for DEI efforts. The Council is charged with leading educational and learning opportunities to advance DEI to ensure DEI collaboration, knowledge sharing, and activity alignment with the strategic plan across office areas and employee resource groups (ERGs).

• Employee resource groups (ERGs). We established seven ERGs to help staff feel more supported and better prepared to approach work challenges related to their identity. The ERGs create opportunities for more open communication about diversity and inclusion and their importance in our work. The ERGs also provide opportunities to improve our cultural competence and ultimately benefit the diverse populations affected by our work.
• Mentoring program. In 2018, we created a mentoring program that, to date, has paired 285 early-career staff with senior colleagues for at least six months of frequent interaction and access to career development resources.
• Unconscious bias training. Senior managers and supervisors go through several hours of training to raise awareness of undetected biases and learn specific techniques to address these biases and help all staff feel included and valued in our workplace.
• Inclusion training. In 2021, we launched a new DEI course for supervisors and staff that teaches strategies and skills for creating and nurturing innovative teams where people from all backgrounds are respected, valued, and given opportunities to contribute.
• Humans of Mathematica. Internally, Mathematica produces digital profiles that let staff share with colleagues—in their own words—stories about their personal and career journeys. To date, the 80 profiles on our intranet have become a cherished way to build community and better understand, communicate, and celebrate diversity and inclusion.
• My Mathematica. Adapted from our internal Humans of Mathematica interviews, this blog series enables staff to share their experiences and underscores how Mathematica values the diverse journeys of our staff and thrives because of them.
• Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pledge to DEI. Paul Decker, our president and CEO, joined CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion^TM with a pledge to check his own bias, speak up for others, and show up for all. He also convened leaders from across the research and evaluation industry to establish a consortium of organizations dedicated to making meaningful and lasting progress toward a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community.

Mathematica is committed to co-creating high quality and objective evidence that demonstrates understanding and appreciation for the context in which our work takes place. To conduct our work in a more culturally responsive and inclusive manner, our approaches carefully consider the decisions we make when designing, conducting, analyzing, and sharing the results of research and analytics.

For those in our field, we facilitate important conversations on building cultural responsiveness into a range of complex topics that the research community is studying, including health care for LGBTQ individuals and the effectiveness of culturally responsive pedagogy. In work for the Regional Educational Laboratory Mid-Atlantic, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, we developed a body of evidence to inform researchers and educators about how to advance educational equity and engage in highlighted culturally responsive practices.

Internally, we are honing our equitable evaluation skills through capacity building and our work with clients. Nearly 100 Mathematica staff participated in our Equity Community of Practice training sessions, which provided us an opportunity to examine our evaluation approaches and values in service of equity-focused grantmaking and policymaking. Our Equity Community of Practice works to (1) internalize an equity results process and identify the culture change required to partner with foundations, grantees, and government agencies; (2) provide a structure and resources to continuously incorporate equity principles into project work; and (3) foster collaboration and connectedness among colleagues and external partners for achieving the vision and commitment to equity.

At Mathematica, we also humbly recognize that we do not have all the answers and that the experts include those who live in the communities we serve, which is why we solicit and incorporate the voices and perspectives of communities. When we work with tribal communities, for example, we incorporate more two-way learning approaches that allow us to gain insights from their stories and understand what research topics are important to them.

Sharing knowledge, continuing to develop our equitable and culturally response research practices, and collaborating closely with communities are ways we illuminate a path to progress.

We collaborate with organizations seeking to expand the pool of professionals from underrepresented backgrounds who work in organizations like ours. For example, we participated in the Expanding the Bench initiative to provide historically underrepresented minority researchers and evaluators an opportunity to work on client-funded evaluations at Mathematica. We have also partnered with Howard University to develop a Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS). The SICSS program is intended to provide training to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty about how digital data can address issues of ethics and equity. In addition, we are a proud sponsor of the Sadie Collective, which aims to empower Black women to enter the field of economics, data science, and related fields. In fact, we sponsored the Sadie Collective’s inaugural Sadie T.M. Alexander Conference, which promoted racial and gender diversity in economics and related fields.

Mathematica also financially supports and actively participates in initiatives like the Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession and Project L/EARN, both of which work to increase diversity in key policy research fields. When pursuing client projects, we form team arrangements with diverse nonprofit and research organizations that are led by or committed to developing researchers of color.

Furthermore, our Communications team works with our partners to develop, promote, and disseminate digital and electronic products that use plain English, inclusive language, and images that reflect diversity and equity. We work to promote accessibility of all products, ensuring that publicly available reports, webinars, web content, and other products are presented in accordance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and amendments.