The Foreign Service Journal, May 2013

M y September 2011 report, “Advance- ment for Women at State: Learning from Best Practices,” includes the fol- lowing recommendations to transform State into a more female- and family- friendly organization. I strongly recommend that State, with support from the Una Chapman Cox Foundation, create a commission or contract with an outside orga- nization to study the gender problem holistically. Someone within the Office of Human Resources or the Office of Civil Rights should be given explicit responsibility for ensuring the success of women, working closely with groups such as Executive Women at State. The Office of Global Women’s Issues should also pay greater attention to how women within State are faring. The following measures would help transform the department into an organization more sensitive to the needs of women and make State a model for other for- eign affairs agencies to emulate. At the same time, this would enable the department to better embody the empowerment of women that it is promoting abroad: • Begin collecting detailed attrition data on female Foreign Service employees, and conduct exit interviews to better understand the factors leading to attrition and retention. • Request that the Office of Personnel Management break out Foreign Service employees’ responses in next year’s Employee Viewpoint Survey, with answers to specific questions by gender. This would provide an excellent snapshot of how both female and male Foreign Service employees feel about State policies, particularly when it comes to work-life balance and family friendly policies. • Construct any future survey State conducts on issues related to quality of life so that the views of Foreign Service employees, broken out by gender, can be analyzed. • Consider undertaking focus group discussions within State on work-life balance and family-friendly policies. Of particular use would be surveys to deter- mine what employees value when it comes to work-life benefits, and what they would be willing to trade off to achieve a better balance. • Analyze the Women in International Security study to identify areas that merit follow-up. The study is available on the WIIS Web site. • Survey women in the Foreign Service to determine how widespread forms of non-overt bias are and what policy response might be required. • Include a discussion of non-overt forms of gender bias in training for supervisors and all State leadership training. • Follow up such training with action plans for employees to use to recognize and overcome biases. Tie success in accomplishing these goals to perfor- mance evaluations. • Task the Federal Women’s Program and Equal Employment Opportunity officers with disseminating information on gender bias and holding programs on this topic in Washington and overseas. • Determine whether demand warrants an expan- sion of the Diplotots and Foreign Service Institute child-care facilities, and whether assistance should be provided for emergency child-care needs. • Publicize the services available through State’s Employee Assistance Program. In particular, include information on the check-in sheet given to all Foreign Service employees reassigned to Washington, since this is a time when many employees are in need of such assistance. • Survey the Foreign Service population to get a clearer picture of how concerns about spousal employ- ment affect employees’ bidding/assignment decisions. • Ensure the Family Liaison Office has adequate funding to expand initiatives to help spouses/partners secure local employment or develop portable careers. Such efforts should include identifying work opportuni- ties with locally based multinationals. • Learn more about the efforts of other agencies with an overseas presence, such as the Central Intel- ligence Agency. • Redouble efforts to secure bilateral work agreements to facilitate the local employment of spouses/partners. • Modify FLO programs to take into greater account Learning from Best Practices 42 MAY 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL