The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2023 37 and/or in vulnerable situations, as well as all women and girls.” President Biden announced a new America’s Partnership for Economic Prosperity with a promise that it would promote growth from the bottom up. As host of the 52nd Organization of American States General Assembly in Lima in October 2022, Peru continued the con- versation among the countries of the region under the theme “Together Against Inequality and Discrimination.” A follow-up Cities Summit of the Americas in Denver in April 2023 included municipal measures to address inequalities. This work exposed some uncomfortable facts. Difficult Truth #4: The consistency of senior leadership mat- ters. An occasional talking point on racial justice or LGBTQI+ discrimination or sprinkling “equity” into documents won’t reduce inequality. Senior leaders from across the U.S. gov- ernment must relentlessly and with humility engage foreign counterparts in the search for innovative solutions to mitigate inequity and inequality. No single country has all the solutions; we stand a better chance of finding them by learning from each other and working together. Difficult Truth #5: The empowerment of marginalized communities may upset traditional elites, many of whom the United States has considered longtime friends. True friends have difficult conversations. Most diplomats are not trained to have hard conversations on racial bias or LGBTQI+ prejudice, nor to handle the backlash. But we and our partners lose when we overlook racism, LGBTQI+ discrimination, misogyny, and religious bigotry; they contribute to instability. We also lose when we overlook a government’s progress on reducing inequal- ity because we don’t agree on other issues; giving credit where credit is due builds trust. Difficult Truth #6: The State Department makes insufficient use of data. Even a widely accepted (albeit imperfect) measure of income inequality such as the Gini coefficient isn’t used very often by U.S. diplomats and policymakers. The department’s Equity Action Plan, required by EO 13985, pledges to integrate equity into every aspect of our foreign affairs mission. I served as a co-chair of the working group that, among other measures, proposed a framework to track progress on reducing barriers to equity. I enlisted the department’s Center for Analytics on a pilot project, a dashboard map of the Americas with country- by-country equity data—wealth concentration, demograph- ics, health and education figures, Gini, etc. We got as far as the review of more than 130 independent data sources to identify the most credible and reliable when staffing turnover and budget challenges stalled the project. Advancing DEIA in Our Workforce In 2018 WHA started one of the State Department’s first employee-led Diversity and Inclusion Councils. By the end of 2022, U.S. embassies and consulates in the Americas had formed more than 30 volunteer DEIA Councils, groups of employ- ees who came together to create more inclusive workplaces. Embassy DEIA Councils hold educational events, pilot diversity recruiting practices and professional development programs, and use data to identify and mitigate disparate treatment in awards, consular services, exchanges, ID checks, and more. FromWashington, we supported WHA employee-led councils’ innovative programs. We advised chiefs of mission and collaborated with the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. We offered eCornell diversity and inclusion courses. When U.S. chiefs of mission doggedly engaged ministries of foreign affairs about equal accreditation for all legal spouses of U.S. diplomats, in several places it made the difference in persuading partner governments to provide same-sex spouses the same privileges and immunities as opposite-sex spouses. And we looked for metaphorical “curb-cuts,” a concept I took from Angela Glover Blackwell’s 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “The Curb-Cut Effect. ” Curb-cuts in public side- walks were required by the Americans with Disabilities Act to give people in wheelchairs access. Who else benefited? Anyone pulling a wheeled suitcase, pushing a stroller, riding a scooter. Focusing on eliminating a barrier to access for one group created better access for everyone. Informed by anonymized workforce demographic data and knowing WHA’s reputation as a cliquish bureau, our first “curb- cut” came from WHA’s assignments chief to make the assign- ments process for FSOs more transparent—less who you know, and more what you know and what experiences taught you. We aimed to attract diversity through inclusivity by making the bidding process fairer for all. (At the same time, diplomacy is a relationship business, so who you know will continue to matter. Unfortunately, weaker professional networks may be an unintended by-product of telecommuting, which anecdotal The empowerment of marginalized communities may upset traditional elites, many of whom the United States has considered longtime friends.