Lydia Dishman

Can the key to getting more American women into tech jobs be in the hands of mayors across the country? It’s an interesting proposition that Anita Garimella Andrews, vice president of client analytics services at RJMetrics recently uncovered when digging into the data surrounding the persistently low percentage of female tech workers.

It turns out that in cities with a concentration of technology companies that also have female mayors, there’s more equality among tech workers. Case in point: Las Vegas, the city leads the country with women making up the majority (over 64%) of its tech workforce. Its mayor is Carolyn Goodman, who’s held the position since 2011, and incidentally has a daughter who graduated from Stanford and worked in IT.

The US average is only 29% according to the RJMetrics survey of the top 50 cities in tech as determined through Meetup data. That’s a bit higher than the 26% of women in computer or mathematical occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported for 2013. Other cities with female mayors didn’t have the scale tip so dramatically toward women employed in tech, but were still higher than the national average. Among them: Oakland 46.8%, Houston 34.25%, Palo Alto 30.19%, Baltimore 29.65%.