Federally Employed Women, an advocacy group for women in federal government is backing legislation designed to increase diversity within the senior executive service.
The Senior Executive Service Diversity Assurance Act — soon to be introduced to the House and Senate federal workforce subcommittees — would establish an SES Resource Office within OPM, charged with setting regulations and providing guidance for the structure, management, and composition of the SES.
The bills would also lead to programs to recruit women, ethnic minorities and persons with disabilities, including at the collegiate level.
"We have been working on this issue for many years, including testifying twice on Capitol Hill," said FEW president Rhonda Trent, adding, "We are so happy to see it come to fruition."
After looking into the representation of women and or minorities in the senior ranks of six legislative branch agencies for fiscal years 2002 through 2007, the House federal workforce subcommittee called on those agencies to improve the diversity of SES successor pools with a look to providing greater diversity in the future.
It found that the minority composition of the legislative branch SES as a whole went down slightly between fiscal 2002 and 2007, and the slow rate of increase in women’s representation suggests that it could take nearly 17 years for women to reach 50 percent of the SES corps.
The panel found that the successor pools at the GS-15 level were less racially diverse at four agencies and less gender-diversity at two of the six agencies, and concluded that if each agency were to hire SES in proportion to the make-up of its GS-15 successor pool, the agencies would actually become less diverse in the future.
It said that if the agencies — also including the Library of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, and Architect of the Capitol – maintain current trends they will have little or no impact on minority SES representation and only a marginal impact on the representation of women.