On May 10, the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service, and the District of Columbia held a hearing on “Ensuring Diversity at Senior Levels of the Federal Government and the U.S. Postal Service.”
“Today’s hearing is being held as a follow up to a hearing I requested in 2003 to look at diversity within the SES [Senior Executive Service],” said Chair Danny Davis (D-IL). He continued, “The hearing was prompted by a GAO [Government Accountability Office] study requested by me and other members of the former Committee on Government Reform. The study found a lack of diversity in the SES and maintained that unless some affirmative action measures were taken once members of the predominately white male SES retired, they would be replaced, for the most part, by white women.” Rep. Davis added, “This hearing will help the subcommittee move forward on the very important issue of diversifying the highest and most influential ranks of the federal workforce, the SES, the Postal Service, and the PCES [Postal Career Executive Service]. This issue is important because the federal workforce should be as diverse as the people it serves. It is simply good business and good government.”
George Stalcup, director of strategic issues for the GAO, said, “Racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in the federal government’s senior ranks can be a key organizational component for executing agency mission, ensuring accountability to the American people in the administration and operation of federal programs, and achieving results.” Citing demographic statistics, Mr. Stalcup noted that in October 2000, “[t]he representation of women ranged from 13.7 percent to 41.7 percent, with half of the agencies having 27 percent or fewer women. For minority representations, rates varied even more and ranged from 3.1 percent to 35.6 percent, with half of the agencies having less than 15 percent minorities in the SES. In 2006, the representation of women and minorities, both overall and for most individual agencies, was higher. The representation of women ranged from 20.4 percent to 47.1 percent, with more than half of the agencies having 30 percent or more women. For minority representation, rates ranged from 6.1 percent to 40.2 percent, with 50 percent of the agencies having over 17 percent minority representation.”
In considering the number of employees eligible for retirement and actual retirement rates, Mr. Stalcup added, “As part of a strategic human capital planning approach, agencies need to develop long-term strategies for acquiring, developing, motivating, and retaining staff. An agency’s human capital plan should address the demographic trends that the agency faces with its workforce, especially retirements.”
“We were happy to see that between 1992 and 2003, women made progress in moving into the SES, moving from 12.3 to 26.2 percent…However, we would suggest that these numbers should move higher to better reflect the percentage of women employed in the federal government overall,” said Rhonda Trent, president of Federally Employed Women. Ms. Trent said that “the lack of training and cross-training [is] a major impediment to women moving into the top levels of the federal government…women tend to be employed at the lower ranks in the federal government at much greater numbers than men. This does not mean that they do not aspire to be in leadership or management positions. Yet, they are not permitted to obtain upper grade training because they are not in upper management jobs.”
Ms. Trent cited the lack of “formal mentoring programs for women in the federal government,” saying that “[w]omen need to have leaders to whom they can ask questions, obtain advice about their careers, receive suggestions on career moves, training needs, and special project assignments, and obtain general information about the process of moving up the career ladder. Obviously because there are far fewer female SES and high-ranking employees in the federal government, our mentor pool is much smaller than that of men…Thus men are often referred or recommended for higher positions while women are not simply because they do not have the luxury of getting under the wing of a female mentor as readily as men.”
Ms. Trent also testified about the need to improve the Federal Candidate Development program and to increase funding for the Federal Women’s Program, created in 1967 by Executive Order 11375.
Nancy Kichak, associate director of the strategic human resources policy division at the Office of Personnel Management; Carlton Hadden, director of the Office of Federal Operations at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Gail Lovelace, chief human capital officer of the General Services Administration; Vickers Meadows, chief administrative officer of the Patent and Trademark Office; Reginald Wells, deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration; and Susan LaChance, vice president of employee development and diversity at the Postal Service, also testified. A number of employee organizations also were represented on the third panel.
