Public administration panel discusses diversity, discrimination

While federal agencies have stepped up their efforts to recruit women and minorities, the higher echelons of government still tend to be dominated by white males, according to new data presented Friday to the National Academy of Public Administration's Social Equity Panel.

"Social equity" in the federal workplace is a difficult term to define, because it entails more than just diversity, John Palguta, director of policy and evaluation for the Merit Systems Protection Board, told the panel.

"It's not an issue of right or wrong, people are looking at what's going on in their workplace through different lenses," Palguta said.

According to Palguta, more than half of African-American federal employees say they are subject to discrimination, while more than 97 percent of white employees believe that African- Americans are not discriminated against in the workplace.

Consequently, the barriers to social equity in the federal workplace encompass more than just increasing the number of women and minorities on the rolls.

"There is a huge gap in terms of perception," he said. "Equity is not just numbers, it's a set of values, it's beliefs, it's perceptions, it's behaviors."

Stepped-up recruitment efforts at the GS-5 through GS-9 levels in the past few years have increased the number of women and minorities governmentwide, said John Crum, MSPB's policy deputy director, at the panel meeting. But minorities are less likely to get promoted, so white males still occupy the vast majority of the senior-level positions in agencies, Crum said.

"Statistics show that as grade level goes up, we're more inclined to hire white men, " he said. "We could increase the presence of women and minorities by hiring more of them at the higher grade levels."

Rather than despair over the numbers, the federal government should find a way to use them to move forward, Palguta said.

"What we try to bring to the table is where we have had success and where we have made progress and in many cases, I think the government is a leader," he said. "We've got more progress to be made, but … let's celebrate the success we've had while we're also looking at what progress we need to make."