The Foreign Service Journal, March 2016

60 March 2016 | the foreign Service journal FS Heritage The evolution of personnel evaluations at State is reflected in the dossier of Frances Elizabeth Willis, the first woman to make a career of the Foreign Service. By N i cholas J . Wi l l i s Nicholas J. Willis is the author of Frances ElizabethWillis (2013), a self-published biography of his aunt, the first woman to make a career of the U.S. Foreign Service. After retirement from a career working with military radar systems and their countermeasures, he devoted himself to collecting her papers and relevant material to document her life. This ar- ticle is an outgrowth of that effort. Frances Willis’ biography is available by emailing ncwillis@msn.com. A s most Foreign Service Journal readers know, Employee Evalu- ation Reports for all U.S. Foreign Service personnel are signed by the rating officer, the rated employee, a reviewing officer and the panel chairperson. Further, the EER program has been vetted and fine- tuned by the Government Account- ability Office in 2010 and again in 2013. But as the career of Frances Elizabeth Willis, the third woman to join the Foreign Service—and my aunt—illustrates, the pro- cess wasn’t always so transparent and objective. Frances Willis entered the Service in 1927, serving for 37 years until reaching the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 1964. Her personnel evaluations started in 1927 with grades and FS PERSONNEL EVALUATIONS, 1925-1955: A Unique View comments from instructors in the Foreign Service School (now the Foreign Service Institute), and ended in 1955 when she was evaluated for the last time, one month before she was pro- moted to Career Minister. Data for Lucile Atcherson, the first woman to enter the Foreign Service, has also become available for 1925 and 1926, so this article covers those two additional years, as well. As H. L. Calkin documents in his 1978 book, Women in the Department of State, these female pioneers were actively dis- couraged from entering or staying in the Service. Just six women were accepted between 1922 and 1941, and only two stayed. Frances Willis was the first of these, and the evaluations in her dossier illustrate the gender-biased procedures used to hold her back professionally. More positively, they also remind us of the extent to which the State Department personnel evaluation system has evolved since then. While many sources in the Foreign Service and Department of State generated personnel evaluations during this period, one element of the system remained constant: the Annual Efficiency Report submitted to the department by the employee’s onsite supervisor. Eventually the AER evolved into the EER, the para- mount metric in the current system, but between 1925 and 1946 it was only one of many inputs considered. It became signifi- cantly more important after World War II. Personnel evaluations generated during this period changed