2018 Score: 48.52 out of 100

Measuring progress toward greater equality in New York City

  • What do we mean by equality?

    Everyone has the same economic, educational, health, housing, justice, and service outcomes regardless of race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender, single parenthood, age, immigration status, criminal record, place of residence, and other characteristics.

    This definition is inspired by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    Read more about this project’s purpose.

    How do we measure equality?

    In NYC, we developed 96 indicators to measure progress towards equality across six thematic areas: Economy, Education, Health, Housing, Justice, and Services. Within each theme, we look at four specific topics. For example, within Education, we look at equality in early education, elementary and middle school education, high school education, and higher education. Finally, within each topic, we look at four unique indicators.

  • What is an indicator?

    An equality indicator is a measure that compares outcomes of groups likely to experience inequalities, such as racial minorities, to groups less likely to experience them, such as whites.

    In this sense, equality indicators are different from social indicators, which do not directly compare groups.

    See the full list of indicators.

    How are indicators reported?

    Indicators are reported in numbers and narratives. Every year, we score the indicators on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 represents inequality and 100 represents equality.

    We compare current and baseline year scores to capture change over time. We group indicators and average their scores to create topic scores, and we group and average the topics to create theme scores.

    Learn more in our methodology section.

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