Home to more than 150 water-related companies and startups, Milwaukee has earned its rights as a top Midwest city for tech.
The ranking was done by Compute Midwest, which adds, "It’s done this with a huge initiative to make Milwaukee a leader in technology. Water Council, a local nonprofit, works to align fresh water-related industries with research communities to bring water to areas in which it’s scarce."
Read the full list here.
In addition to this powerful ranking, SmartAsset, a company which creates software to analyze and measure data in order to understand answers to complex financial questions, ranked Milwaukee as one of the 10 top cities in the country for women in the technology field.
The city ranked high due to its gender pay gap, which equates to less than 2%, along with its employment ratio. While the national average for women in computer and mathematical occupations is 26.5%, Milwaukee holds an impressive 32.2%. The city beat out cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Seattle, Boston, Houston, San Diego, and many more.
SmartAsset's data and methodology breaks down as the following:
"To find the best cities for women in tech, SmartAsset looked at U.S. Census Bureau statistics on women and men in “computer and mathematical occupations” throughout the U.S. Our analysis considered 58 of the largest U.S. cities – any city in which the tech workforce was large enough for statistically significant Census survey results. For each of those 58 cities, we calculated the following four metrics:
- Women as a percentage of the tech workforce.
- Gender pay gap in tech.
- Income after housing costs. (Median income for women in computer and mathematical occupations minus typical housing costs such as real estate taxes, insurance and mortgage payments.)
- Three year tech employment growth. This statistic includes tech jobs for both men and women.
"We ranked each of the 58 cities in our analysis according to these four metrics (the full list of cities and data for each metric is at the end of the article). We then averaged those rankings, giving half weight to tech employment growth and full weight to the other three metrics.
"Lastly, we calculated an index score based on those averages. A city ranked first in each category would score a perfect 100, while a city ranked last in each category would score a zero. A score that is closer to 100 reflects a better tech employment environment for women."
Read more of Smart Asset's report here.