Argonne National Laboratory

Human Resources Division

Argonne Employee Demographics

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Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: Essential to Argonne

At Argonne, bringing together people whose cultural and intellectual backgrounds equip them to look at issues from different viewpoints is key to collaboration and innovation. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are critical as we strive to fulfill our mission and enhance our impact in a safe and welcoming workplace environment that reflects our communities and our nation.

To set a course to where we’re going, we need to know where we are. As an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer, Argonne reviews its demographics annually to help inform strategies related to recruitment, retention, and advancement.

We are always looking for different ways to analyze our workforce. We now take a more intersectional approach, informed by The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Report on Trajectories of Women of Color in Tech, showing distribution by gender in both the job categories and ethnic/racial groups. Argonne leads the national laboratories in using this method for sharing its employee demographics.

This approach acknowledges the intersectionality of individual identities to help foster the understanding that individuals don’t fall into a single category. This will help us better ensure a safe, welcoming, equitable, and inclusive work environment for all our employees.

While we recognize that gender is not binary, we display gender here using the categories of men and women based on the self-identification options provided in the government reporting requirements we follow. We will continue to work towards greater inclusion of all genders. We also updated the color palette used in the graphics on this page to make it more accessible for individuals with color blindness.

    These figures reflect the laboratory’s employee population as of July 1, 2022, with 3,850 total employees.

    Argonne Demographics Data in Detail

        Categories with small numbers of employees are expressed as a less than (<) percentage so that no employees are individually identifiable in this published information.

        • Senior Leaders: Senior directors and chief roles
        • Technical Leaders: Research/development scientific and engineering managers
        • Operations/Research Support Leaders: Professional, administrative, and technical managers
        • Research Staff: Research/development scientists and engineers
        • Operations/Research Support Staff: Professional, administrative, and technical/engineers
        • Postdocs: Postdoctoral researchers
        • Graduate Students: Graduate students funded by the lab
        • Undergraduate Students: Undergraduate students funded by the lab

        Argonne’s Diversity Commitment

        Argonne is committed to increasing representation of women and racial and ethnic groups in our workforce. This commitment has led to an increase in the percentage of racial and ethnic diversity of employees lab wide from 24.5% in 2016 to 32.5% in 2022, and at senior leader levels, we are at parity with 50% women. Through strategic DEI planning, we will work to make further progress. Steps we are taking include:

        • Utilizing an external assessment of DEI to identify opportunities to create an even more welcoming and inclusive laboratory;
        • Establishing strategic priority areas of diverse representation, having a voice, equity, accountability and commitment; and
        • Incorporating our Core Values of Respect, Integrity, Safety, Teamwork, and Impact into the performance appraisal process to institutionalize associated behaviors.