You are here: Home >> Research >> Health Workforce Diversity Initiative >> Diversity Tracker

*The Diversity Tracker will be expanded to include data on Asians and Native Americans as well as additional professions in the near future.

About the Health Workforce Diversity Tracker

The Health Workforce Diversity Tracker provides a unique view into how the racial/ethnic diversity of the workforce in 10 key health professions varies across states.  Despite recent focus on this issue, little information is available on how representation in the health professions differs across the country. This tool is intended to help people working in health education and policy understand which professions have the greatest gaps in their region.
 
The “New Graduates” tab provides data on the representation of Black, Hispanic, and White populations among people who graduated with health profession degrees from 2017 through 2019, an indication of the likely diversity of the future workforce.  This data is from The Integrated Post-Secondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics.
 
The “Current Workforce” view provides data on the representation of Black and Hispanic populations among those working as health professionals today. This data is based on Mullan Institute’s analysis of 2010-2019 data from the American Community Survey, obtained from IPUMS USA (University of Minnesota).
 
The map displays how the Diversity Index, which is a measure of the diversity of the health profession compared to the diversity of the benchmark population, varies widely across state for all professions. For example, for Black registered nurses, the Diversity Index for the Current Workforce ranges from a low of 0.25 (Iowa), indicating severe underrepresentation, to 1.33 (New York), indicating moderate overrepresentation. Details on how the Diversity Index is calculated is available in the Methodological Appendix. 

request data tables

Resources: Methodological Appendix  
​Related Research: 

• Estimation and comparison of current and future racial/ethnic representation in the U.S. health care workforce
• Limited, uneven progress is increasing racial and ethnic diversity of dental school graduates

Diversity Tracker Team: Nicholas Chong (Tableau), Erin Brantley (Data analysis), Edward Salsberg (Director, Health Workforce Diversity Initiative)
Contact Us: We welcome feedback on the Diversity Tracker and how it might better meet your needs. Email ebrantley@gwu.edu with questions or comments.

SUGGESTED CITATION: Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity. Health Workforce Diversity Tracker. Washington, DC: George Washington University, 2021. www.gwhwi.org/diversitytracker.html.

​ACKNOWLEDGMENT: ​Support for the development of the State Health Workforce Diversity Tracker was provided by the ​Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and The California Endowment.