Tulsa makes progress in addressing inequality gaps, Equality Indicators report shows

The city’s aggregate score of 42.37 out of 100 is the highest it’s been since the first report was issued in 2018. Previous years’ scores have been adjusted to reflect a change in indicators measured.

“I am grateful for the time and effort that went into putting these scores together, and I’m encouraged to see continued improvement in our scores since we started tracking these numbers six years ago,” Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a press release. “The data in this report is invaluable, and we will continue to use it to track progress and see where we can improve.”

The report looks at six themes, or areas: economic opportunity, education, housing, justice, public health, and services.

Each indicator is scored on a scale from 1 to 100, with 1 indicating high inequality and 100 indicating high equality.

In all, 54 indicators — nine for each theme — are measured to come up with the score for each theme and the city’s overall score.

Krystal Reyes, who oversees the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity, said it is important to understand how to interpret the scores.

“It measures inequality across these 54 indicators, and it always looks at the group experiencing the best outcomes, or the highest outcomes, to the group experiencing the poorest outcomes, or the lowest outcomes,” Reyes said. “So when we first published this in 2018, the data showed what those two groups were for each of those indicators, and that is what we have been tracking over time.

“It depends on the indicator. For some the focus was veterans; for others it was gender, so males versus females; and for others it was a racial group compared to another racial group.”

She noted that a disparity, or inequality, can be shrinking between two groups, “but that could mean that the group that was doing well is doing worse or that the group doing poorly is doing better but not at the same rate as the group doing better.”

Tulsa’s average scores in four of the six themes have improved from the baselines established in the initial report. Those are economic opportunity (nearly 5 points), education (more than 12 points), housing (2 points), and public health (nearly 8 points).

Two themes, justice and services, have seen their scores decline since 2018 by approximately 5 and 1 points, respectively, according to the latest report.

“The justice theme includes a variety of indicators from police representation of women and Latinos, to arrests, to child abuse and domestic violence,” Reyes said. “Gains in some indicators may be overshadowed by decreases in others.

“For example, the topic of arrests — that topic increased in equality, but the other two topics decreased — including indicators related to child abuse and neglect, (which has) decreased by 25 points since 2018, and homicide victimization, which has decreased by 16.”

The indicator with the largest positive change since 2018 is “chronic absenteeism by race” among students with an increase of 58 points. The indicator “homelessness by veteran status” has seen the largest negative change since 2018 with a decrease of 30 points.

The Mayor’s Office established an Office of Resilience and Equity about the time the first Equality Indicators report was published.

Reyes acknowledged that improving Tulsa’s overall Equality Indicators score will take time but said the city’s score is similar to the scores of most other cities that track such data.

“It is important to look at progress and changes over time. We are moving in the right direction, as we can see from the past few years of reports,” Reyes said.

“Even more of a focus on these areas and what the city can do is important, but many of these indicators have causes and mitigation factors in non-city systems. So it will take many sectors to impact these numbers.”

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