Local businesses and community leaders met Thursday morning on the campus of Penn State Behrend to discuss diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace.

The 2024 ERIE conference explored equity gaps in the labor market, bringing to light pay discrepancies based on race, ethnicity, and gender.  Attendees say it has impacts on the economy as a whole. 

"The estimates of the benefits are staggering. It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars," said Ken Louie, director of the Economic Research Institute of Erie at Penn State Behrend. "If we're able to remove some of those gaps in the earnings ability based on race, ethnicity and gender, we could add literally hundreds of millions of dollars in the economy."

Research for the conference shows that Black men earn, on average, 73% of what white men make, with Hispanic men tending to earn less. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, its predictions indicate that over a 30-year period, the amount of money lost from workforce inequality will total over $25 trillion dollars.

Keynote speakers represented local businesses, such as Erie insurance, the Erie regional chamber and growth partnership, the Pennsylvania Department of General Services and the Erie Racial Justice and Policy Initiative.

Louie, who is also a professor of Economics at Behrend, says that creating equality in the workforce has the potential to add a large amount of money back into the economy.

"I think we all benefit from learning from more enriched social experiences, from more positive interactions when the colleagues and friends with whom we interact are more diverse," Louie said.