Chapter 23 Introduction to Employee Demographics
Employee demographics include a broad array of variables that can be used to describe an organization’s work force. Examples include sex, gender identity, race, ethnicity, age, national origin, age, veteran status, and disability status, for example. In addition, we can describe who employees report to (e.g., direct supervisor), the facility where they work, or their unit (e.g., department, division).
Although they can be used in more advanced analyses, employee-demographic variables are also amenable to descriptive statistics. By applying descriptive statistics like counts, measures of central tendency, and measures of dispersion to employee demographic variables, we can summarize the workers in an organization – or even across organizations. Doing so can elucidate an organization’s level of demographic diversity, and kept help an organization understand the extent to which its workers reflect the broader population of available workers in the labor pool.