The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2016 31 positions that are held in reserve with the Bureau of Human Resources. When a post has selected the primary member of the tandem couple and does not have a vacant position to accommodate the partner, it can request one of the positions from the pool to be temporarily transferred for the duration of the tandem couple’s assignment. At the end of that assign- ment, the position returns back to the pool for use by another post. The second option would be to forgo the reserve pool of positions and simply allow the tandem partner to double- encumber an appropriate position at post for the duration of the couple’s assignment. The number of reserve-pool or double-encumbered positions available to a post could be capped at one for posts with 10 or fewer direct hires, two for posts with 11 to 20 direct hires, and so on. The tandem couple could also opt out of this method and bid separately on positions at the same or different posts for the purposes of career advancement. They might even be required to do so because of anti-nepotism provisions. The current method of treating the tandem couple as two distinct bidders forces its members to sell themselves as a pair, shopping for locations that have the need and desire for both members, usually with one or even both sacrificing career advancement. Tandems not only have to concern themselves with their own corridor reputation but that of their partner. They are keenly aware that their marital status significantly influences their careers, regardless of how many people parrot that the federal government cannot discriminate on grounds of one’s marital status. So long as the bidding and lobbying process involves humans making deliberate (not blind) decisions rooted in corridor reputations, offices will always know which bidders are members of tandem couples. Treating the members of a tandem couple as one bidding unit puts them on an even playing field with both their married and single non-tandem colleagues. Is the alleged mountain of anti-nepotism and nondiscrimination provisions merely a molehill?