MDRC Organizational Structure and the Demographic Composition of the Staff and Board

MDRC had 339 staff at the end of 2023, an eight percent increase since the end of calendar year 2022. MDRC is operating with a hybrid work model, taking advantage of our four offices to promote in-person interaction among colleagues, while also allowing staff to enjoy the benefits of working remotely part time. More than half of MDRC's staff lived in the New York metropolitan area and worked out of our New York City office. Eight percent of MDRC staff were in our California offices (Oakland and Los Angeles), and five percent were associated with our office in Washington, DC. The remainder worked remotely out of their homes around the country.

Sixty-seven percent of MDRC’s staff had research, policy, and practice roles, which means that they worked on or directly supported our research, evaluation, and technical assistance projects. Twenty percent of MDRC’s staff performed administrative roles—such as finance, human resources, information services, and legal—or communications and development roles. Finally, 13 percent of staff were part of our senior management team, and they worked across departments, performing programmatic, administrative, and management functions. Senior management as of December 2023 included our president, vice presidents, directors, general counsel, chief information officer, chief communications officer, deputy chief financial officer, and other unit leaders.

As researchers who use rigorous methods to learn about policies and programs, we know that measurement is fundamental to diagnosing problems and tracking change. We also know that widely disseminating findings holds organizations accountable for refining and achieving their goals. Thus, we believe that to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at MDRC, we should treat it as we would treat the issues we address in our research. This means careful measurement and transparency to promote accountability.

To that end, below we provide an overview of MDRC’s staff demographic characteristics, as of December 31, 2023. First, we share our gender and race composition—two important measures of staff diversity, but by no means the only measures we care about. These statistics show that our staff are diverse in both gender and race, but we recognize that we still have significant room for improvement, and the section that follows provides a glimpse of what we are doing to get there. These statistics focus on diversity because it is easier to measure than equity, inclusion and belonging, but we hold each value in equal regard, and the activities described in Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion demonstrate some of our efforts to strengthen each of these mutually reinforcing values.

Gender and Race/Ethnicity Composition

The charts below show MDRC’s self-identified gender and racial/ethnic composition as of December 2023, which can be compared to data from December 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.^[1] In 2023, 72.6 percent of MDRC's staff identified as women and about one-half of the staff identified as White, and the composition varied by the types of roles staff held. A small number of our staff members have identified themselves as not conforming to the gender binary.

We are committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive work environment for all employees, and we respect and acknowledge the diverse identities within our team. There was more gender, racial, and ethnic diversity among MDRC’s administration, communications, and development staff than among our research and senior management staff.

We began collecting demographic data from the members of the MDRC Board of Directors in 2019. As of the end of 2023, 60 percent of the MDRC Board members identified as White, 20 percent as Black, 7 percent as Asian, and 7 percent as Hispanic/Latinx, and 47 percent identified as women.

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