The Foreign Service Journal, March 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MARCH 2014 19 n You need a graduate degree to obtain most positions in USAID, and the pool of Hispanics with graduate degrees is limited. P eriodically, I am asked to speak to Hispanic and minor- ity students aspiring to enter the Foreign Service or the U.S. Agency for International Development. I can hardly resist the chance to tell my own life story and describe the places where USAID has sent me. The Foreign Service is a great career, I tell them, and I encourage them to consider taking the plunge. One reason I’m tapped to give these speeches is that I’m a 25-year veteran of the Foreign Service, and also a member of an endangered species: mid-level Hispanic FSOs. My agency is sincerely trying to recruit a more diverse work- force, but has consistently failed in terms of Hispanic representation since the late 1970s, when data on ethnicity began to be collected. Recently I asked several members of USAID’s senior leadership and Office of Civil Rights and Diversity for their thoughts on why the agency’s record is so poor. Here are some of the responses I got: n This is a governmentwide problem, and USAID does as well as or better than other U.S. agencies. n Things are getting better. SPEAKING OUT Hispanic Representation at USAID: Why So Low for So Long? BY JOSÉ GARZÓN José Garzón, a 25-year veteran of the USAID Foreign Service, is currently deputy director of the agency’s Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation in Washington, D.C. He has served in Bolivia, Guatemala, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Wash- ington, D.C., and is the author of “Democracy and Development Reconsidered,” published in USAID Frontiers in Develop- ment (2012). In 2013, he was the first to utilize the newly created USAID Direct Channel, writing on the subject of the small number of Hispanics in the USAID Foreign Service. A social scientist by training, I decided to peek behind the curtain and examine the evidence. It turns out that all these responses are wrong. Re-Examining the Conventional Wisdom First, let’s take the assertion that USAID is “doing no worse than everyone else.” Oh yes, it is. As the table to the left, based on the most recent data from the Office of Personnel Management and USAID, shows, USAID is at the bottom among federal agencies in Hispanic representation. The percent of Hispanics at the State Department is about twice as high as at USAID, and in the case of State Foreign Service specialists (at 8 percent), almost three times as high. Well, at least it’s “getting better,” con- sistent with demographic trends, right? No, it’s actually getting worse. True, Hispanic representation in the U.S. government is improving, rising from 6.5 percent in 2000 to 8.1 percent in 2011, according to OPM’s Eleventh Annual Report. But at USAID, the trend is slip- ping backward. Twenty years ago official USAID/EEO staffing reports showed a Hispanic workforce of 3.1 percent out of 3,346 employees, according to the 1992 Sources: OPM: Eleventh Annual Report to the President on Hispanic Employment in the Federal Government, July 2012; USAID/OCRD Diversity Profiles, June 2012; Department of State, Diversity Statistics as of 9/30/13. HISPANICS IN SELECTED U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES Department Percentage of Hispanics in Workforce in 2011 (State data is from 2013) Homeland Security 20.9 Social Security Administration 14.3 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission 13.4 Justice 8.7 Housing & Urban Development 7.0 Veterans Affairs 6.8 NASA 6.2 State (combined FSO, FSS, Civil Service) 5.9 State FS Specialist 8.0 State FS Generalist 5.0 State Senior FS 4.6 Health & Human Services 3.2 USAID (including FS & CS) 2.6 USAID FS 2.5 USAID SFS 2.2