Women, minorities underrepresented at top of congressional agencies

Women and racial minorities are underrepresented in the senior ranks of six legislative branch agencies relative to their presence in the general workforce of those agencies, according to a report released Tuesday by a House subcommittee.

The report, based on data gathered by the Congressional Research Service and analyzed by the staff of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, found that there were a smaller proportion of racial minorities in the Senior Executive Service than in the general workforce at the Government Accountability Office, Library of Congress, Congressional Budget Office, Government Printing Office, Capitol Police and the Office of the Architect of the Capitol. There were smaller proportions of women in the SES than in the general workforce at GAO, LOC, CBO and GPO.

"Diversity in the senior levels of executive and legislative branch agencies brings a variety of perspectives and approaches to policy development and implementation," said Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill. In achieving such diversity, he added, "the executive branch is doing poorly and the legislative branch agencies are only doing slightly better."

Representatives of the named agencies said they agreed with the goal of increasing diversity in the senior ranks and outlined programs to promote diversity and improvements. But they said that significant challenges remain.

Nadine Elzy, director of the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity at GPO, said the agency has targeted college outreach efforts to five historically black colleges and five Hispanic-serving colleges.

Theresa Bailey, director of AOC's Office of Equal Opportunity, said her office also tries to do targeted outreach, advertising in Spanish-language newspapers such as El Tiempo Latino, and working with the Mayor's Office of Latino Affairs in Washington and the American Association of African American Museums.

Stephanie Ruiz, director of human resources and equal employment opportunity officer at CBO, said the agency targets participants in specific academic programs such as the American Economics Association's Summer and Minority Scholarship Programs, the Latino Law and Public Policy Conference at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and the American Indian Graduate Center.

But she also said demographic and economic pressures in the potential applicant pools make it hard for CBO to recruit more diverse applicants and to compete with the private sector.

According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago for the National Science Foundation, only 30 percent of economics doctoral recipients in 2005, the latest year for which data was available, were women. Foreign nationals received two-thirds of that year's economics doctorates. That left CBO without a diverse pool of candidates to recruit, Ruiz said, and available candidates often preferred to go elsewhere for financial reasons.

"Any Ph.D. economist coming into the market worth their salt can go to Wall Street and make substantially more than our economists," Ruiz said. "One of our economists took a position where his compensation was twice that of our director. Our current director took a pay cut to come to CBO."

GPO's Elzy said the agency has cut the time it takes to investigate a diversity complaint from three years to 151 days in the last decade, and has made adherence to equal opportunity laws and policies a category on which managers are evaluated during performance reviews.

Dennis Hanratty, director of human resources services at the Library of Congress, said that organization had adopted metrics to measure managers' effectiveness in promoting diversity.

"As part of their annual performance review, all senior managers must show their commitment to eliminating any underrepresentation and grade level disparity of minorities, women and persons with disabilities," Hanratty said.

Ronald Stroman, managing director of GAO's Office of Opportunity and Inclusiveness, said officials worked hard to prepare minority and female applicants to rise into the SES ranks, and felt the agency was doing well as compared to the rest of government.

"Over the next several years, we think the feeder pools will allow ascension into the SES at commensurate levels," Stroman said.

He said the agency was making efforts to address issues with GAO's performance system, which produced consistently low ratings of African-American candidates, and had hired an outside firm to evaluate the system and to make recommendations for improving it.

Shirley Jones, president of the GAO chapter of Blacks in Government, said she was encouraged by the agency's decision to bring in an outside organization, the Ivy Planning Group, to evaluate its system.

"I applaud the agency for doing the study now rather than later in the midst of budget constraints and continuing resolutions," Jones said. "I am hopeful that the study will in fact make actionable recommendations that will ultimately lead to greater diversity at all levels."

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., said she was particularly concerned by the failure of minority and female applicants to rise through the ranks to become senior executives.

"The more you're able to show large numbers [of minorities and women] in the ranks, the greater the burden on you to show why they're not rising through the ranks like everybody else," she said.

The subcommittee's report said lack of diversity in "successor pools" of GS-15 employees was particularly disturbing because it could undermine stated commitments to promoting women and minorities. The Library of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office, the Capitol Police and the Architect of the Capitol had smaller percentages of minorities in the GS-15 ranks than in the SES ranks, and the library and the architect's office had smaller percentages of women GS-15s than SES members.

"If these agencies hire future members of the SES in proportion to these pools, the diversity of SES will diminish at each of these agencies," the report noted.

"In order for agencies to achieve levels of diversity that they currently don't have, they have to increase the number of women and minorities in those successor pools, hire outside of those successor pools, or both," said Curtis Copeland, a specialist in American National Government at the Congressional Research Service. Even "at that [current growth] rate, it would take about 17 years for women to reach the 50 percent mark" as a percentage of the SES.

Those problems with successor pools mean that existing offices of diversity and equal employment opportunity may not have the authority they need to promote SES diversity, GAO's Stroman said.

"All the civil rights offices within the legislative branch offices are essentially focused on complaint processing," he said. "What we are talking about with regard to increasing diversity requires oversight over the human capital processes of each agency."