The Goals of Diversity & Inclusion in Federal Agencies

Most workplaces strive for better diversity, establishing initiatives to create a more representative workforce and address potential barriers to inclusion. Nowhere is this truer than in federal agencies, which are guided by policy directives on the matter.

Management Directive 715 (MD-715) is direct guidance from EEOC to agencies in the Federal Government on how to establish and maintain programs for equal employment opportunity under Section 717 of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The policy guidance is designed to help agencies report on current diversity and inclusion (D&I) efforts, and ideally identify and address barriers that might have arisen. With annual reports delivered to EEOC to meet MD-715 guidelines, every agency is engaged to some degree in this process, but it doesn’t always do enough to meet these goals across the entire government.

Findings from the Most Recent Federal Diversity Report

 

Despite the annual efforts of the government to increase racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in public service, a recent Federal Equal Opportunity Recruitment Program Report to Congress showed that minority representation did not change from FY 2015 to FY 2016. Women increased slightly, rising to 35.3 percent, but still well below the proportion of the overall workforce, and minority representation as a whole was only 21.2 percent. 

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How big of a gap is this between the public and private work sectors? In 2016, white males made up 36.1 percent of the workforce overall, but in government, they represented 66.4 percent and in SES, they represented 78.8 percent. Why is this the case, especially with the regular efforts in all government agencies to identify the issues that create these gaps? 

According to the president of the Senior Executives Association, Bill Valdez, it comes down to three issues: a lack of a link between mission and programs, the inability to explain the ROI of these efforts, and “the lack of rigorous and analytical basis for D&I programs.” 

That last item in particular is a major pain point in a lot of agencies who don’t have the resources or tools needed to effectively evaluate why these issues persist.


The Gaps in the Current Reporting Process and How to Meet Goals

 

What can agencies do to better address the very real gaps that have developed and persist in D&I efforts in the government? It starts with understanding. Many agencies are too resource-constrained to do little more than surface evaluation of the MD-715 reporting results every year. Through more efficient MD-715 reporting analysis delivered by better technology tools, it’s possible to go much deeper. 

Barrier analysis considers location, agency size, and the nature of the positions being evaluated to determine what the appropriate breakdown should be to meet diversity and inclusion goals. While some triggers that indicate diversity barriers are readily apparent, many are not. Not only are triggers often subtle, but they will be different for each agency, office, and position type. Factors such as lack of diversity in the hiring pool, the interview process, the recruiting process to fill the pool of applications, and the internal process by which employees are considered for promotion can all be barriers with thousands of potential triggers influencing each of them.

The EconSys Diversity Analysis Solution is designed to identify these triggers and analyze MD-715 reporting results much more comprehensively than is possible manually. With a framework designed for improving and extracting more valuable information from MD-715 reporting, Diversity Analysis from EconSys can provide the rigorous analysis currently missing in many agencies and help to get them closer to their diversity and inclusion goals. Learn more on our website or download our eBook, How to Shift from Data Gathering to Data Driven Decisions in Your MD-715 Reporting: