New State Department Diversity Data Exposes Challenges and Opportunities

This is a project documentation and repository of the original report published on fp21.org.

Recently released State Department demographic statistics leave much to be desired. Only aggregated summaries of the data are presented, and only for the past two years. This makes it nearly impossible to run external analysis of the data or identify trends over time. This project aims to fill this gap by using sophisticated data science tools and archival information to examine representation in American diplomacy.

We examine the historical diversity of State Department officers from 1965 until today. Specifically, we estimate the gender and ethnic makeup of the State Department workforce.

To contextualize these estimates, we compare them to baseline estimates of the historical percentage of female and nonwhite individuals in both the general US population and the US college graduate population.

Summary of Results

Gender

We estimate there to be a gender gap of 20% in the State Department workforce, with over 60% male names and less than 40% female names. In comparison, the United States female population has steadily hovered around over 50% since 1965, and the percentage of female college graduates in the United States has reached over 50% since 2008.

Ethnicity

We estimate at least a 40% discrepancy between white and nonwhite names (70% white vs. 30% nonwhite). In comparison, both the percentage of non-white population and the percentage of nonwhite college graduates in the United States have reached over 40% in the past few years..

Acknowledgements

Huge thanks to Morgan Ivanoff, Vic Marsh, and Tomoe Gusberti for their contributions to this project.