Many US transit agencies currently face low satisfaction ratings from riders, severe difficulties with retaining workers, record-high rates of violence against employees, and shrinking budgets. Conditions are such that some agency leaders are facing calls for removal.
To hurdle these challenges, transit agencies will have to cast a wide net in search of effective improvement strategies. In addition to their ongoing efforts, such as seeking new funding and implementing service enhancements that better meet riders’ needs and behavior, transit agencies should consider the effects of greater gender and racial, diversity in organizational leadership. Research has shown that diversity in leadership is correlated with more effective problem-solving and decisionmaking, more creativity and innovation, better employee retention, and greater productivity.
Representation in governing entities—that is, how much a constituency sees their salient identities reflected in its civic leadership—influences trust and can foster a greater sense of confidence that one’s voice will be meaningfully considered and that one’s participation is impactful, resulting in increased community engagement. Further, representation among leadership is also associated with improved relationships between businesses or service providers and their customers.
Against this backdrop, we ask: what does the landscape of transit leadership racial and gender diversity look like? How well do transit agency leaders represent their constituencies? How does representativeness among heads of transit agencies compare with other offices of civic leadership?
Diversity in transit leadership varies by agency size and geographic region
Publicly available data on the demographic characteristics of transit leadership are limited. The information that does exist can be disaggregated only down to job category, not specific role, and to either classifications of gender or race, not their intersection. To pull the curtain back, we compiled a dataset including the highest-ranked official (e.g., general manager, CEO, or president) between September 2021 and September 2023 at the 50 transit agencies that carried the most riders over that time. For a sense of scale, 86 percent of all transit trips made nationwide in 2023 were served by these 50 providers.
In the absence of a single official source capturing the self-stated gender and racial identities of these leaders, we collected perceived gender and race using the following information availability hierarchy: the leader’s gender and racial identity in writing on the agency’s website or self-stated by that leader in an interview, pronouns and descriptions used in media outlets (e.g., “she is the first Black woman to serve in the role”), and Wikidata on a leader’s gender and race. This methodology mirrors other research with similar data availability challenges.
Among these 50 agencies, 71 percent of leaders are white. Black heads-of-agency compose 25 percent of total leaders and 84 percent of all leaders of color. The remaining heads-of-agency in this cohort are Asian, accounting for 5 percent of all leaders. This group skews male (63 percent), and no leader in the dataset has a nonbinary gender identity.
A look at variation by agency size reveals the following:
- The largest 10 agencies, which carry 65 percent of nationwide ridership, are less likely to have a woman leader compared with the top 50 agencies.
- Women of color hold a smaller share of leadership positions in the largest 10 agencies (7 percent) than they do in the top 25 (10 percent) or in the top 26 to 50 agencies (9 percent).
- Men of color account for a slightly larger share of leadership among the largest 10 agencies than they do among the largest 50 agencies.
By geography, agencies in the West and Midwest have higher shares of women transit leaders (43 and 41 percent) than those in the South (27 percent) and Northeast (39 percent). By race, however, this relationship is inverted, as a greater share of transit leaders in the South and Northeast are people of color compared with the West and Midwest.
Do heads-of-agency reflect the diversity of transit ridership?
Nationwide, women account for more than 55 percent of transit riders. However, among the 50 largest agencies, women hold just 37 percent of head-of-agency positions. For riders of color, the discrepancy is even wider, with about 60 percent of riders compared with a mere 29 percent of transit leaders across these agencies being people of color.
The greatest representation gap regarding race and gender identity pertains to women of color. Despite accounting for the largest share of national transit riders, women of color make up just 9 percent of transit leaders in this agency cohort, the smallest share by far. Exclamations of underrepresentation would be understatements.
These representation gaps compare the 50 largest agencies with nationwide ridership, not just their own riders. Very few agencies track ridership by race and gender, and the majority of publicly available ridership demographic data are limited to work trips—a shrinking share of total trips taken.
Still, wanting to add location-specific nuance to our analysis, we used Census data to examine the 2023 gender and racial compositions of the most populous municipality in each of our transit agencies’ service areas. This approach assumes that people living in an area served by transit could reasonably be considered potential riders of those systems. We also expanded our dataset to include the demographics of those who held mayoral office between September 2021 and September 2023, using the same method of determining an individual’s race and gender as previously described. Finally, we compared resident demographics with both civic leadership positions of mayor and head-of-transit-agency.
Among these municipalities, the share of mayors of color (54 percent) and residents of color (55 percent) have been nearly identical, while transit leadership has skewed much more white than resident populations. Conversely, mayors have been more disproportionately male than transit heads-of-agency, though both fall far from population parity.
White women represented a larger share of transit heads-of-agency than they do residents. The same is true of men of color and mayoral office. The only group underrepresented in both positions of power are women of color. Unsurprisingly, white men are the only group overrepresented among both leadership positions compared with their presence in the population.
Taking steps toward closing leadership diversity and representation gaps
Strategies for increasing workforce diversity and representation, both generally and specific to the transit industry, have been rigorously studied, well documented, and widely circulated. Still, key barriers to progress remain. Two vital steps toward hurdling those obstacles include the following:
- Establishing a means of accountability. Explicitly stressed as early as 2007 and reemphasized in recent months, the lack of data that allow for analysis of intersecting identities remains a significant issue. Without these data, agency performance regarding workforce diversity and representation can’t be determined or tracked regularly and reliably. The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) could require all transit agencies to include workforce identity data by position, including all people with decisionmaking authority in their annual reporting. This information could then be made publicly available through the National Transit Database.
- Using federal funding to support effective promotion pathways with clear benchmarks. The FTA National Transit Workforce Development Strategic Plan 2023 to 2028 sets the goal of “advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging” within the nation’s transit workforce, explicitly naming a 2 percent annual increase in “promotions among underrepresented populations” as its benchmark. In its present form, this goal does nothing to prevent the continued concentrations of diversity advancement among agencies of certain sizes, in certain parts of the country, and within certain job types. Instead, diversity goals could be set per agency and per job type. Policymakers could also extend federal financial support for workforce development and composition change beyond apprenticeships, construction, and operator roles to include the entirety of an agency’s workforce, with detailed plans for leadership recruitment and retention of underrepresented people in executive suites. Finally, formula funding could be more directly tied to agency performance against promotion benchmarks, rewarding agencies for contributing to the meeting of diversity, equity, and representation goals.
Without these elements of trackability, support, and incentive, the hope of advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging within the nation’s transit workforce is no more than that—a hope. Without progress, the operational benefits of diversity and representation among leadership will continue to remain disappointingly out of reach of the nation’s transit providers.
Let’s build a future where everyone, everywhere has the opportunity and power to thrive
Urban is more determined than ever to partner with changemakers to unlock opportunities that give people across the country a fair shot at reaching their fullest potential. Invest in Urban to power this type of work.
