New State Department Diversity Data Exposes New Challenges and Opportunities
By: Ellice Huang, Thomas Scherer, Vic Marsh, & Dan Spokojny | August 31, 2023
A condensed version of this report was published in the Foreign Service Journal’s September edition. This page contains the project documentation and repository with additional context and data analysis. Thanks to Morgan Ivanoff and Tomoe Gusberti for their contributions to this project.
The State Department’s first Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Strategic Plan states: “We need to be transparent in our efforts. This means transparency as we analyze and report DEIA-related data and trends...” The very first goal in the strategy is for the department to broaden the availability and analysis of demographic data to support an evidence-based approach to improving our diplomatic workforce and evaluate progress.
A key finding of our own organization’s research into evidence-based solutions for State Department’s workforce challenges is that data is a vital strategic capability. Demographic data is necessary to both diagnose obstacles and create targeted solutions. Transparency creates shared identification of problems, conveys to employees that diversity is an important goal, and creates accountability for progress.
The State Department should be commended for releasing demographic baseline numbers this summer, as promised in the FSJ article. That said, the data still leave much to be desired. Only aggregated summaries of the data are presented, and only for the past two years. This makes it nearly impossible to run external analysis of the data or identify trends over time. For example, many officials at State believe they hit a glass ceiling blocking their career progression, but aggregated data cannot expose where people get stuck in the system.
fp21 is working to fill this gap by using sophisticated data science tools and archival information to examine representation in American diplomacy.
Data and Methods
Our primary data source is the State Department Key Officers of Foreign Service Posts directory, which is a series of documents going back to 1965 that list Foreign Service officers and their positions assigned to each U.S. embassy. In addition, we use data from the World Bank and US Census Bureau to serve as baseline statistics to compare with our results (see full citations).
Using text-scraping tools, we extracted the names and positions of more than 110,000 key officers—the people who serve as team leaders in embassies. We then used classification tools to identify each officer’s gender and race based on their first and last name. More information on the technical process of data extraction and analysis can be found in our project documentation and repository website.
It is important to note that our work is meant only to estimate ballpark figures of diversity among State Department officers and provide time trends. We recognize that our dataset and analysis is by no means perfect and should not be reported as fact.
In June the State Department released the DEIA Demographic Baseline Report with workforce data for 2021 and 2022 broken down by key demographics, grade/rank, and job series. We cannot make a direct comparison as the our dataset only includes key officers which span multiple ranks. However, if we assume that key officers reflect the demographics of their career track, we can see whether our aggregate numbers are similar.
Table 1 shows top-level comparisons between fp21’s Key Officer data and the State Department’s Baseline Report. Looking across the entire foreign service, the % female of fp21’s data lies between the State’s figures for generalists and specialists, as we would expect given our assumption. The % white in fp21’s data is slightly below that of the State data. However, percentages for Black, Asian, and Hispanic are similar between the two datasets. The difference for % white may be because fp21’s dataset includes Middle Eastern as a separate category and State does not.
Table 1. Comparison of State Department’s DEIA Demographic Baseline dataset and fp21’s Key Officer’s of Foreign Service Posts dataset
Results
Gender
Our analysis shows that the gender gap among those who lead embassy offices is steadily narrowing but will not completely close until after 2040 (see Figure 1). Today, we estimate there to be over 60% male names and less than 40% female names in the key officer population, a 20% discrepancy.
Figure 1. 1965-2022 Key Officer Name-Gender Classification
The picture is more complicated when one examines specific job categories. Underrepresented groups have long suggested that high-profile jobs are reserved for white males. Is this true?
We can see in Figure 2 that while consular and public diplomacy jobs are close to parity, political, economic, and management jobs are disproportionately male. This is significant because the expectation at the State Department is that political and economic jobs are feeder jobs to positions of higher authority.
Figure 2. 1965-2022 % female key officers, by job category
That said, our analysis shows more females than males over the past decade in principal officer assignments. Why might this be? Perhaps female officials are on average better qualified than their counterparts, leaders are going out of their way to select females for high-profile jobs, or women are disproportionately landing in less significant principal officer spots, such as one- or two-person outposts far away from capitals.
Ethnicity
Our data on race and ethnicity are less accurate given the uncertainty of identifying these characteristics from names alone. The gap in terms of ethnicity, nationality, and cultural diversity is wide. Though the non-white and white proportions appear to diverge over time (see Figure 3), we estimate at least a 40% discrepancy between the two groups even today, at 70% white and 30% nonwhite.
We provide a more comprehensive look into the key officer population breakdown by race and ethnicity in our project documentation website.
Figure 3. 1965-2022 % of white vs. nonwhite key officers
Baseline Comparisons
When comparing fp21’s diversity statistics of the State Department workforce against the general US population and the US college graduate population, it is clear that the State Department has work to do. The key officer population lags behind the gender baselines by about 15%, and behind the ethnicity baselines by about 10%.
Gender
Recall our initial analysis that the State Department workforce is estimated to be less than 40% female. The United States female population has steadily hovered around over 50% since 1965. At the current rate of growth of women at State, we estimate the gender gap in the key officer population will reach parity around 2040.
Figure 4. 1965-2022 % female key officers vs. US population
When taking education levels into consideration, the results are more revealing. The percentage of female college graduates in the United States has stayed above that of female key officers, with the percentage of female college graduates seemingly reaching gender parity just recently around 2008 (see Figure 5). Today, it appears the State Department is still playing catch-up. We estimate that the key officer population lags behind the college graduate baseline by about 15%.
Figure 5. 1965-2022 % female key officers vs. US college graduates
Ethnicity
Recall our initial analysis that the State Department workforce is estimated to be less than 30% non-white. In contrast, the non-white population in the United States has reached over 40% in 2020 (see Figure 6). We estimate that the key officer population lags behind the US population baseline by about 10%.
Figure 6. 1965-2022 % nonwhite key officers vs. US population
When taking education levels into consideration, the results are similar: the key officer population lags behind the college graduate baseline by about 10%. It appears that the stock of nonwhite officers initially stayed at or above the US college graduate baseline, but dropped below starting in 2003 (see Figure 7).
Figure 7. 1965-2022 % nonwhite key officers vs. US college graduates
Conclusion
If more detailed (but carefully anonymized) data is made public, one would be able to answer many more vital questions at the State Department. Which mid-level jobs lead to high-profile positions down the road? What experience, skill, and training are most useful for promotion? Are certain bureaus and embassies doing a better job of managing a diverse workforce?
Recent steps to publish demographic data are a step in the right direction. We hope the State Department will now take the next step to follow through on its Strategic Plan and make its workforce data more transparent. Treating demographic data as a strategic asset would be a positive step for a department that has historically struggled to leverage the best that this diverse country has to offer.
