A 3.9% share, concentrated in one corner of the agency
The Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) employs 4,617 people across 284 job class codes. Of those, 180 — just under 4% — are classified as Asian. On the surface that looks like a modest presence. But where those 180 employees actually work tells a sharply different story.
Asian TWC employees are not spread across the agency the way the overall workforce is. They cluster almost entirely in information technology: programmers, systems analysts, data analysts, network specialists, cybersecurity analysts, and systems administrators. Meanwhile they are nearly absent from the agency's core public-facing mission — workforce development, unemployment insurance, and customer services — which employs nearly a third of all TWC staff.
38.9% of Asian TWC employees work in IT and technology roles. Across the full agency, IT accounts for only 7.5% of all positions. Asian employees are more than five times as concentrated in tech as the typical TWC worker.
This concentration drives their salary premium. IT roles at TWC pay a mean of $84,705 — well above the agency average — and Asian employees fill a disproportionate share of the higher rungs on that ladder. Their average annual salary of $72,197 sits 18% above the agency-wide figure of $61,201.
Job category breakdown: Asian vs. all employees
The chart below shows what share of each group falls into each job category. The gap in IT is striking; so is the mirror-image gap in Workforce Development and Customer Services, where Asian employees are dramatically underrepresented relative to their share of the overall workforce.
| Job category | Asian | Asian % | All TWC % | Asian avg salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IT / Technology | 70 | 38.9% | 7.5% | $87,840 |
| Workforce Dev & Rehab | 22 | 12.2% | 17.6% | $52,013 |
| Finance & Accounting | 17 | 9.4% | 7.6% | $52,010 |
| Customer & Human Services | 15 | 8.3% | 16.3% | $44,545 |
| Program & Project Mgmt | 15 | 8.3% | 15.4% | $72,986 |
| Management & Leadership | 13 | 7.2% | 10.0% | $107,481 |
| Admin / Office Support | 10 | 5.6% | 5.5% | $40,218 |
| Legal / Counsel | 8 | 4.4% | 3.1% | $80,394 |
| HR & Training | 1 | 0.6% | 3.3% | $63,000 |
| Other | 9 | 5.0% | 13.7% | $61,073 |
Asian employees hold 20% of all IT positions at TWC
The Texas Workforce Commission has 344 employees in technology roles. Asian workers fill 70 of them — 20.3% — despite being only 3.9% of the total workforce. This is the clearest sign of occupational concentration in the data.
Within IT, Asian employees skew toward the upper rungs. The most common title is Programmer V (10 employees), followed by Systems Analyst VI and Systems Analyst V (6 each) — these are senior-grade positions. The mean salary for Asian IT employees is $87,840, modestly above the $84,705 average for all TWC IT workers, reflecting their seniority distribution.
Tenure note: Asian employees at TWC have an average tenure of 5.7 years, compared to 7.6 years for the full workforce. The recent acceleration in Asian IT hires — 23 to 28 per year in 2022–2025 vs. fewer than 10 per year before 2020 — explains most of this gap. The agency has been actively adding Asian tech workers over the past four years.
Salary by ethnicity: Asian employees lead the agency
Average annual salaries across the TWC's six reported ethnicity categories show a wide spread. Asian employees top the list at $72,197, while Hispanic and Black employees — who together make up 55% of the workforce — earn substantially less than the agency average.
Hispanic and Black employees make up 55.3% of the TWC workforce — the majority by a wide margin — but their average salaries ($55,839 and $56,971 respectively) sit $4,000–5,000 below the agency average of $61,201. Both groups are underrepresented in higher-paying IT and management roles and overrepresented in lower-paying customer and human services positions.
Asian employees (180)
All TWC employees (4,617)
Highest-paid Asian employees at TWC
The ten highest-paid Asian employees span IT, management, and legal roles. The top earner — a Data Officer — earns $146,121, the highest salary in the group by a significant margin.
| Name | Title | Annual salary |
|---|---|---|
| Chakravarty, Dipanjan | IT Data Officer | $146,121 |
| Dokka, Swati | MGMT Director II | $134,481 |
| Barik, Chitta Ranjan | IT Programmer V | $131,526 |
| Podisetti, Sreemanvika | IT Systems Analyst VI | $128,825 |
| Kumar, Rajiv | IT Data Architect I | $128,201 |
| Ohn, Judy K | MGMT Director II | $126,787 |
| Chattopadhyay, Anindo | MGMT Manager V | $125,685 |
| Sriraman, Vinitha | MGMT Manager V | $121,884 |
| Darwaish, Ferotan | IT Network Specialist VI | $120,161 |
| Cunningham, Susan M | MGMT Manager VI | $120,042 |
What the data tells us
The Texas Workforce Commission's Asian workforce is, in practice, functioning as the agency's IT department. Nearly 4 in 10 Asian employees work in technology roles — an occupational concentration more than five times greater than the agency average. This is not a recent artifact: hiring data shows a sustained pattern going back well before 2018, with a marked acceleration in Asian IT recruitment after 2020.
The $72,197 average salary for Asian employees is not evidence of equitable opportunity across the workforce — it reflects assignment to a specific, higher-paid segment of the agency. Asian employees are nearly absent from the frontline roles that define TWC's public mission: unemployment insurance processing, workforce development counseling, and eligibility services.
Meanwhile the groups who do the bulk of that public-facing work — Hispanic employees (34.4% of the workforce) and Black employees (20.8%) — earn average salaries between $55,000 and $57,000, well below the agency mean, and are underrepresented in both IT and management categories.
At TWC, ethnicity correlates strongly with occupational category, and occupational category drives salary. Asian employees are concentrated in IT; White employees are overrepresented in management; Hispanic and Black employees fill the lower-paying service and support roles that keep the agency running. Whether that sorting is the product of hiring practices, visa-driven labor pipelines, or systemic barriers to advancement is a question this data cannot answer — but it raises it clearly.
Explore the full agency dataset at guestworkervisas.com/tx_employees.php