Published: August 25, 2003

New Push for Diversity: OPM Moves To Address ‘Underrepresentation’ in Senior Ranks

By Tim Kauffman [The Federal Times]

The Bush administration is stepping up efforts to hold agencies accountable for improving the diversity of their work forces, particularly at senior levels, after the release of new data that shows little progress to date.

Nonwhites held 13.5 percent of the government’s 15,000 senior pay positions in fiscal 2002, up slightly from 13.1 percent a decade ago, according to a recent report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Senior pay positions are those above the rank of GS-15, including Senior Executive Service, Senior Foreign Service, administrative law judges, and top technical and scientific employees.

Overall, percentages of blacks, Asians and American Indians in virtually all federal pay grades meet or exceed those of the national work force overall. But in the Senior Executive Service and equivalent senior pay grades, all minority groups are underrepresented as compared with their percentage in the national work force overall.

One big exception concerns Hispanics, who are vastly underrepresented in all federal pay grades.

Hispanics represented 7.1 percent of the federal work force and 3.3 percent of the senior federal work force in fiscal 2002. But they represent 12.4 percent of the national work force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Federal officials are breaking down data from the 2000 Census to determine national work-force demographics based on occupations, which should give agencies more accurate benchmarks than using overall employment figures. But the new data are not expected until later this year.

Even so, officials say the picture is clear.

“We don’t have to wait until the Census is released to know there’s underrepresentation,” said Marta Perez, the Office of Personnel Management’s associate director for human capital leadership and merit system accountability.

Still, some progress is being made, Perez said. The percentage of minorities is steadily growing.

“The trend is a positive trend, particularly when you look at an almost stagnant growth of the size of the work force,” she said.

Agencies should give themselves an A-plus for their overall hiring of blacks, Asian Americans, American Indians and Alaskan natives in fiscal 2002, said Jorge Ponce, co-president of the Council of Federal Equal Employment Opportunity and Civil Rights Executives, an independent group of EEO and civil rights leaders.

However, they deserve a C grade for the hiring of white females, Hispanics and people with disabilities, Ponce said. The low representation of Hispanics is especially egregious since they now represent the largest minority group in the country, he said.

“I think it is time that federal managers start paying attention to enhancing or improving the Hispanic representation in the federal work force, which has never reached parity with the civilian labor force benchmark,” Ponce said.

Holding Agencies Accountable

While agencies largely are responsible for managing their own hiring programs, OPM is beefing up its oversight role with an eye toward ensuring diversity in the work force, Perez said.

OPM plans to conduct more thorough and more frequent reviews of agencies’ recruitment and hiring programs, Perez said. Those reviews help ensure agencies are not discriminating against employees or job applicants when deciding who to hire, fire, promote or suspend.

Under Title 5 of the U.S. Code, OPM can require agencies to correct any violations of merit-based hiring it may uncover in its reviews. For example, OPM last year ordered the Labor Department to give priority job consideration to two veterans who were illegally passed over for a position that was given instead to a political appointee with less experience.

In addition, OPM is responsible for grading how well agencies manage their work forces as part of the president’s management agenda. Agencies without diverse workplaces will not get high marks from the administration, said Perez, whose office hands out the grades to agencies.

“In order for an agency to get to green [which indicates success], it says the agency must have a diverse work force, including mission-critical occupations and leadership [positions],” Perez said. “You can’t get away with [a situation where] only the lower grades are diverse and then you have lack of diversity in the top ranks of the organization.”

That is particularly important to diversity proponents, who argue that if minorities do not see opportunities for themselves in the higher ranks, they are unlikely to want to work for the government.

“There are minorities in the civil service who really feel like they have little or no chance at all of ever reaching the top,” said Illinois Rep. Danny Davis, ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform subcommittee on civil service and agency reorganization.

Whereas pay and promotion decisions at the lower pay grades are based largely on tenure and skill, federal executives can be more subjective in determining who joins the SES or receives other high-paying opportunities, Davis said. And when it comes to making subjective hiring decisions, many people — unconsciously or not — gravitate toward candidates who look like them.

Davis commended OPM’s efforts to hold agencies accountable for the hiring decisions they make.

“The decision-makers know that they’re being checked, they’re being scrutinized, that people are looking and reviewing to see what they’re doing,” he said.

OPM’s expectation is that agency leaders will include diversity goals and requirements in executives’ individual performance plans.

For example, SES members at OPM are rated in part on how they increase employment and career development opportunities for Hispanics, who are the most underrepresented minority group governmentwide. The executives also are judged on how much support they give to the agency’s work-force diversity and EEO policies and programs.

Making those links between agency goals and senior managers’ individual performance plans is what will drive results at agencies, Perez said.

“The real growth and positive outcomes exist when agencies make a leadership commitment,” she said. “Results are what matters — not that agencies have plans in place, but that they have measurable results.”

Creating a Pipeline

Increasing diversity in the government’s highest ranks requires improving diversity in the government’s lower ranks, officials said.

“By the time we focus on the numbers at the top, we have already missed the boat, because the problem is at the middle,” said Carol Bonosaro, president of the Senior Executives Association, which represents the government’s 6,000 career SES members.

Indeed, EEOC data show that women and minorities comprise smaller percentages of the work force as the pay grades increase.

On average, whites earn between half a grade and one-and-a-half grades more than minorities in each occupational category, except for clerical positions, where blacks earn slightly more.

The average pay grade — or General Schedule level — for whites is 10.4, compared to 10.1 for Asians and Pacific Islanders, 9.3 for Hispanics, 8.9 for blacks, and 8.5 for American Indians and Alaskan natives. The average grade for women of all colors is 10.4, compared to 10.9 for men.

One barrier to increasing the number of women and minorities at the senior ranks is the fact that turnover in those career positions is low, and the government has not been increasing the number of top positions, said Mary Louise Uhlig, president of Executive Women in Government.

“Between people not retiring and not a lot of growth, that equates to not a lot of opportunity,” Uhlig said.

A new governmentwide authority that allows agencies to offer buyouts to employees with outdated skills without eliminating their positions could help improve opportunities for minorities, she said.

OPM also is doing its part by launching a new hiring program this fall that is intended to ensure agencies have a diverse group of qualified candidates in the pipeline for SES positions.

Through the Candidate Development Program, federal employees at GS-14 or GS-15 or those in comparable positions in the private sector can apply for a yearlong training program that will culminate with them being certified for SES positions.

Many agencies already run their own SES candidate-development programs, but OPM’s will be the first governmentwide effort.

“This provides an opportunity for all agencies to supplement what they have in place and to give an opportunity to small agencies that ordinarily would not have the funding or resources . . . to set up their own program,” said Maria Mercedes Olivieri, an OPM staff member in Perez’s office.

Agencies will contribute money to fund the first group of about 50 candidates, and OPM will increase agencies’ allotments of SES positions temporarily to ensure that the program’s graduates can be placed into SES positions, Perez said.

OPM plans to release details on how people can apply for the program in about a month. Agencies will have the final decision in selecting candidates and must follow merit-based hiring procedures in making the selections, but OPM will monitor how agencies use the program to ensure a diverse and qualified group of candidates is selected, Perez said.

Rawle King, president of the Washington chapter of Blacks in Government, said he hopes OPM’s program fares better than similar attempts at some agencies to increase diversity through candidate development programs.

“From what I’ve observed . . . there’s been very little change,” King said.

King, Perez and others agree that real change occurs only when an agency’s leaders make it a priority issue. In too many instances, that has not happened.

“There appears to be a lack of will to address the problem seriously,” said Manuel Oliverez, president of the National Association of Hispanic Federal Executives.