Prospects For Achieving A Representative Federal Bureaucracy

For nearly two decades, it has been the policy of the United States Government to achieve a workforce representative of the nation's diversity. While the importance of a representative bureaucracy has also been acknowledged in the scholarly literature, there has been considerable debate as to how best to determine when and if the objectives of this theory have been met. Most analyses have relied on assessing the numeric representation of women and minorities in organizations, without considering that more than a group's presence may be required for that group to have an equal opportunity to advance and share in decision making. This dissertation draws from research in the fields of sociology, psychology, and organizational behavior in order to develop a new framework for assessing the federal government's progress toward achieving a representative workforce. Relying primarily on responses from samples representative of various groups of federal workers, supplemented by information from a central federal workforce database, it assesses the extent to which perceptions of discrimination, supervisors' lack of support for the concept of representative bureaucracy, miscommunication and subtle bias, and the poor representation of women and minorities in supervisory levels act as barriers to the full participation of women and minorities with the bureaucracy. I find that in many small but important ways, these factors do have an impact on the participation of minorities and women within the bureaucracy, particularly because they are not isolated from one another but serve to compound one another. For example, I find some evidence that poor representation in supervisory levels can increase the likelihood that women will perceive discrimination, and therefore that they will leave their organizations, and that it can similarly adversely affect recruitment efforts of underrepresented minorities. I further conclude that while surveys can improve our understanding of the underlying issues affecting women and minorities' participation in organizations, even survey data fail to provide a complete comprehension of the complex relationships involved in the human interaction that makes up the bureaucratic environment.