The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released its annual “Hiring and Retention of Minorities, Women, and Persons With Disabilities in the United States Intelligence Community” report for fiscal year 2023. The report found the trend in hiring and retention was largely unchanged from previous years.
“Minorities, women and people with disabilities (PWD) continue to make up a low proportion of the IC workforce composition when compared with two key benchmarks: the compositions of the broader federal government and the U.S. civilian labor force. Trends for PWD are difficult to fully ascertain because of the large number of people across all parts of the talent lifecycle that have declined to disclose their disability status,” the summary noted.
The Minority Report
The report added that efforts to “diversify the recruitment pipeline” have improved from last year, but there is still room for growth.
“Some minority applicants—particularly Asian, Black or African American, and Hispanic or Latino/a applicants—disproportionately did not make it through the application process to onboard as new hires,” it added.
In fact, the report warned that the workforce composition has been trending backward. In 2020, 27% of the workforce was made up of minorities, and 27.6 percent in 2021 – while it was 26.7% for FY23.
The study further found that minority officers have continued to face barriers to promotions to higher grade levels and remain particularly underrepresented at more senior grade levels.
“The shares of General Schedule (GS)/General Grade (GG) 15 and senior level officers has increased modestly over the last five years. All race and ethnic demographic groups except for Asians had declining shares of promotions as grade level increases; all racial and ethnic minority groups including Asians were underrepresented at the GS/GG-15 and senior ranks in FY 2023,” the report stated.
It also found that there was still a major barrier for Asians promoted to GS/GG-15 or higher. They were disproportionately placed in expert positions rather than management positions. Moreover, the lack of representation at more senior ranks was cited as a factor for the higher rates of attrition. The report warned that heightened anti-Asian sentiment in the United States due to the COVID-19 pandemic may also have accounted for the relatively high attrition rates among Asian officers.
“Notably, all racial and ethnic minority groups had more negative responses to questions surrounding diversity and equity in the IC Employment Climate Survey’s DEIA Index,” the study also found.
Women Underrepresented
The FY23 study also found that women continued to be underrepresented in the overall workforce, even as there had been incremental improvement in recent years.
There was a roughly 7% gap between the percentage of women in the overall workforce (41.6%) compared to the composition of women at the senior levels (34.3%) has remained constant. Minority women accounted for the vast majority of the disparity.
The women’s share of applicants to the IC (35.7%) was more than 10 percentage points less than the representation of women in the overall U.S. civilian labor force (46.8%). In addition, non-minority women’s share of new hires was 23.3%, smaller than their current IC representation of 27.0%. The group was also significantly underrepresented in the applicant pool (17.5%).
The report did indicate that “non-minority women were well-represented in promotions to all grade levels and made up a proportional share of IC officers at the senior ranks” at 26.5% compared with their overall IC composition of 27.0%.
“This positive trend contrasts with the experience of non-minority women in the broader U.S. labor force. While many non-minority women in the IC may still experience many of the same factors hampering their private sector counterparts—such as challenges with work-life balance, microaggressions, and biases against women—this is not affecting representation at senior levels in the IC for this demographic group as a whole,” the report spelled out.
PWD in the IC
Those identifying as PWD in the IC workforce have decreased from 11.9% in FY20 to 9.8% in FY23, and it has been suggested that the pandemic may have disproportionately impacted this segment of the workforce. Applicants that self-identified as PWD – at 16.5% – exceeded that of the current percentage of PWD (9.8%) in the workforce, while PWD only made up 9.3% of new hires.
“PWD were well-represented across most mission categories, with the exception of Collection and Operations, and Enterprise Management Support. PWD made up a declining share of promotions as grade-level increases, with the exception of promotions to the senior rank—where they were overrepresented. This may be in part because the likelihood of disability increases with age,” the report noted.
In addition, the report found that “IC career lifecycle trends for PWD are challenging to assess because the share of people who decline to disclose disability status often exceeds the share of PWD in a given grade level, mission category, or other slice of data.”
Reason for Concern?
The issue of “diversity hires” continues to be a controversial one, especially in an election year. The IC is likely no exception, as it attempts to balance diversity with finding the best talent.
“It is the chicken and the egg theory, if you are lacking diversity then you will be challenged in attracting and more importantly retaining diversity,” explained Michelle Jolivet, CEO of DEI Recruiting and Consulting and author of the forthcoming book Is DEI Dead? The rebranding of Inclusive Organizations.
Jolivet told ClearanceJobs that the IC is now facing some of the challenges of the information technology (IT) sector.
“Organizations with more diversity, statistically are more productive and more innovative and attract higher talent,” added Jolivet. “It will continue to impact the IC’s ability to retain and attract the best talent to drive innovation, especially with Gen Z – 87% will demand a diverse and inclusive culture.”
