EEOC Reports Men Occupy Majority of Federal STEM Workforce, Women Disparate
A new report from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) examined federal workforce data from 2019 to measure the gender equity of employees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) roles. The report stated that women occupy 29.3 percent of STEM positions, indicating that the government still has a long way to go in addressing overall harassment, participation, leadership and pay.
Men have dominated STEM fields for decades, with a disproportionate number of men in STEM leadership positions. In the federal workforce, men occupy 74.1 percent of STEM leadership roles—a gap evident both among executives as well as among managers and team leaders, according to EEOC data.
Among the federal workforce, 29.3 percent of STEM positions women hold is slightly more than their 27 percent share of overall civilian STEM employment. There were 49,546 women working in science occupations in the federal sector and 6,469 women working in math occupations. The number of women in technology and engineering was significantly lower than expected. Women were about 40 percent less likely to work in engineering, 33 percent more likely to work in math, and nearly 92 percent more likely to work in science than in technology jobs after accounting for the average pay gap of $4,300 a year.
Then there are the harassment and discrimination claims. In 2019, 34,483 women received counseling on EEO related matters. Of those counseled, 14,096 decided to file formal complaints. According to the report, 1,986 complaints described generalized harassment and 358 complaints involved sexual harassment. The EEOC found a strong correlation between women’s intentions to leave their current agencies and their complaint activity, as women who reported a high level of sex-related complaints were more likely to state an intention to leave.
The report also segmented the federal STEM workforce by race and ethnicity within the breakdown of gender. The majority of women federal employees in STEM roles are white is 66 percent, while Black women make up about 14.6 percent; Asian women at 9.8 percent; Hispanic and Latinas at 6.4 percent; Alaska Native and American Indian women at 1 percent; and Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women at 0.3 percent.
The EEOC found that women who believed their supervisors were committed to diversity received less counseling and filed fewer formal complaints.
Carlton Hadden, Director of the Office of Federal Operations at the EEOC, recommended the government take the next step in addressing recruitment and retention starting at all levels of the STEM federal workforce, especially at lower levels, to address these gaps.
“This is where I think the government needs to take the next step—enterprise wide across the federal government—in how they do recruitment and retention starting at the lower grades,” Director Hadden said. “There are multiple STEM, cybersecurity, and other workforce initiatives in various states of planning or execution being driven by multiple entities. A more holistic plan would gain better traction, especially if combined with a FITARA-like scorecard that holds the federal government at large and agencies accountable.”
EEOC officials gathered and analyzed information from numerous federal sources to prepare this report, including: (1) the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Enterprise Human Resources Integration (EHRI) data; (2) EEO complaint data; (3) select OPM Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) responses.
