The future of the US digital economy depends on equitable access to its jobs

Over the past several years, emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI) have dominated headlines, while industrial strategies centered on technologies such as semiconductors have become central to U.S. economic policymaking. Meanwhile, a growing stream of scholarship has shown that certain groups—including women and many workers of color—remain underrepresented in technology-oriented fields, despite the importance of diverse workforces for firm, industry, and national competitiveness.

This new analysis finds that far from being unnecessary overreach, proactive policies aimed at reducing disparities by race and gender are still needed to support the well-being of the digital economy.

This report contributes to the literature on inclusion in digital technologies by exploring which workers have access to “highly digital” jobs—namely, those that make the most intensive use of digital technologies. It focuses on a subgroup of highly digital occupations: computer, engineering, and management (CEM) occupations, which play unique roles in the digital economy.

Computer and engineering jobs are central to the creation and dissemination of the products and processes that enable the digital economy. In this regard, these occupations aren’t just highly digital themselves—they also build the technologies that make other occupations highly digital.

Management occupations, meanwhile, help shape the direction of hiring and advancement for firms and industries. Among other responsibilities, management occupations play a unique role in determining the demographics of highly digital occupations: who has access to the opportunities these jobs provide, and who doesn’t.

In short, highly digital CEM occupations play a central role in enabling the future direction of the digital economy.

However, today, CEM jobs remain highly unequal across gender, race, and place, with little progress over time in remedying these inequalities. As the report and below interactive demonstrate, the supply of highly digital CEM jobs varies significantly by place. However, women as well as Black, Latino or Hispanic, and Indigenous workers remain underrepresented in every metropolitan area in the nation.

This analysis comes at a critical time. In recent years, federal policymakers have begun working to reverse demographic and geographic economic divides through a set of historic investments contained in major federal laws. Yet for all of that, emerging political and legal efforts are seeking to eliminate policies aimed at supporting the progress of historically underrepresented racial groups, and the election of Donald Trump is likely to accelerate the rollback of such policies on the federal level. This means that just as new initiatives have moved to address demographic and geographic divides, the emerging federal policy landscape threatens to block efforts to help workers find opportunities in CEM or other highly digital workplaces.

These crosscurrents could prevent workers from accessing the best-paying, most technology-oriented occupations. In this regard, this report provides six key data-oriented findings about highly digital CEM jobs, and identifies three important barriers to improving demographic and geographic inclusion in highly digital CEM work. From there, it proposes a series of robust state and local policy recommendations to build out the pathways to such opportunity, as well as needed federal supports.

As the report concludes, only through sustained investment over time and an enthusiastic embrace of new approaches by all stakeholders—including those in the private sector as well as state, local, and federal actors—will the nation be able to build a stronger, more equitable, and ultimately more competitive digital economy.