After finding an under representation of women and or minorities in the senior ranks of six legislative branch agencies, the House federal workforce committee has called on those agencies to improve the diversity of SES successor pools with a look to providing greater diversity in the future.
The subcommittee said it analyzed information that the six agencies provided about the race and gender of their SES or equivalent officials who were on board at any time during the six fiscal years 2002 through 2007.
It said the results indicate that SES in the Congressional Budget Office, Government Printing Office and in the Capitol Police were less diverse in terms of race and or gender than other federal agencies.
Four of the six agencies had no Asians in their SES, all had a lower percentage of minorities in their SES than in their workforces overall, and four had fewer women at the top than the rest of their workforces, according to the report.
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 committee found that the successor pools at the GS-15 level were less racially diverse at four agencies and less gender-diverse at two of the six agencies, and concluded that if each agency were to hire SES in proportion to the makeup 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.
