Ask (Google) and you shall receive!

DING!

Huzzah for the 2010 Nonprofit Employment Trends Survey, which is conducted through a partnership between Nonprofit HR Solutions (though I suspect they are not a non-profit) and the Caster Family Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research.

Though the data is not specifically focused on arts non-profits (and they don't use a hyphen in "non-profit" so I should check my style guide, huh?), it covers a broad scope of non-profits and it seems that data should translate relatively well to arts organizations.  As it turns out, the suspicions generated by my certainly limited interactions thus far with organizations that have cooperated with my fieldwork interviews seem to be supported by statistical demographic data by this particular group of 500+ non-profits who responded to the Survey.  I'm not especially surprised at that, but I didn't feel alright continuing on without some data to support my perceptions.  On the hiring of qualified and diverse staff, the Survey says:

"Diversity across age, gender, and race remains a staffing challenge for many organizations. By far, balancing ethnic diversity (43%) is the most challenging diversity issue faced by the respondents to this survey. Furthermore, 65% of respondents reported that attracting qualified persons of color is their organization’s greatest ethnic diversity challenge.
 
Twenty-nine percent of respondents reported that balancing gender diversity was their greatest challenge and 13% of respondents reported balancing age diversity as their greatest challenge. In our observations, the vast majority of nonprofit positions below the senior executive level appear to be dominated by women. As such, attaining gender diversity is commonly found to be an issue at the executive levels of larger nonprofits and the staff levels among medium and smaller sized nonprofits.

Interestingly there appears to be a relationship between organizational size and issues of diversity. The percentages suggest small organizations have less of a challenge with diversity. Moreover, the percentage of organizations indicating balancing gender and age diversity as their greatest diversity challenge increased as the organization grew in size. The 2009 Nonprofit Times list of top 50 leaders reflects this phenomenon where 62% of those named were men and only 38% were women.
 
However, larger organizations seemed better able to manage the challenge of ethnic diversity since the percentage of organizations indicating balancing ethnic diversity as their greatest diversity challenge decreased as the organization grew in size."

They go on to say, regarding more specifically the race and ethnicity of non-profit employees:

"The composition of organizational respondents’ staff race and ethnicity were also representative of the nonprofit sector as a whole where approximately 60% of the employees are white. It is also important to note that the percentage of non-white staff decreased as the position level increased. This confirms the need for increased ethnic diversity in top leadership positions in the sector."

YAY, RECENTLY COLLECTED DATA!