Many Don’t See Women As Leaders At Work

Despite progress toward greater gender equality, on average, men are still more likely than women to emerge as leaders, according to a new study.

Researchers aggregated 59 years of research, encompassing more than 19,000 participants and 136 studies from lab, business, and classroom settings. They discovered that while the gender gap has narrowed in recent decades, it still persists. Today, for example, women hold just 26 percent of executive-level positions in S&P 500 companies.

“As a society, we’ve made progress toward gender equality, but clearly we’re not quite there,” says Katie Badura, a doctoral student at the University at Buffalo School of Management. “Our results are consistent with the struggle many organizations face today to increase diversity in their leadership teams.”

The researchers primarily attribute the gender gap to … [For the rest of the article, click here.]

Do you agree with the conclusions of this article? What other recommendations might you have to help the gender gap discussed here?

When Hiring a Particular Candidate Might Constitute a Prohibited Personnel Practice

Perhaps over the past several months, hiring officials have contemplated how they would advertise a vacancy on USAJOBS and may even have a particular candidate in mind whom they believe would be “perfect for the job.”

This article discusses an area of law not widely known to federal managers—specifically, the prohibited personnel practice that can result from defining the scope or manner of competition or requirements for a particular position in a way that favors certain candidates, or disfavors others.

Picture this scenario: an agency hired an employee for a four (4)-year term position to fill a critical need for a linguist in a remote area. That employee was not veteran’s preference-eligible, but at the time he competed for the term position was the best qualified linguist among all non-preference eligible applicants and, therefore, got the job.

The agency’s linguist requirement continued longer than expected, so the agency received… [For the rest of the article, click here.]

Before reading the article, would you have considered the linguist scenario to have constituted a prohibited personnel practice? Did your opinion change after reading the article?

How to Avoid a Sexual Harassment Claim

Nobody wants to spend time with their agency’s legal staff to deal with a mess that could have been avoided (see “How to Stay Out of Your Lawyer’s Office”). One of those messes is being involved in a sexual harassment claim.

So, what do you do? You start by acknowledging that as an executive, you set the tone for your workplace. You treat each member of your staff with respect and treat them fairly and equally.

Not only do you not engage in unwelcome behaviors, you understand that… (for more, click here).

What other ” straightforward suggestions for the workplace” would you have to help your fellow employees and agency leadership prevent sexual harassment?

Google Memo Completely Misses How Implicit Biases Harm Women

Workplace biases are back in the national conversation, thanks to the recent memo by a Google employee. The memo’s author challenges the company’s diversity policies, arguing that psychological differences between men and women explain why fewer women work in tech.

He also minimizes the effect that unconscious biases have on women in the workplace. Even though most of us believe that we value others equally and don’t discriminate, research shows that our unconscious beliefs show up in our actions. (For more, click here.)

How have you seen the concept of implicit bias influence your workplace? Which of the examples cited most impacted your understanding of the way it can play out in your organization?

Women Still Underrepresented in the Highest-Paid Federal Jobs

A significant number of women have climbed the career ladder to better paying federal jobs over the last decade, but men still occupy a disproportionate number of the most lucrative executive branch positions, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management.

As of March 2017, men made up 53.7 percent of the federal workforce, but held 66.3 percent of the jobs paying $150,000 or more, an analysis by Government Executive found. There was a positive correlation between income level and male representation in every Cabinet-level agency.

The analysis used data from OPM’s FedScope portal and broke down the more than 1.7 million white-collar employees working at Cabinet agencies by department, income and gender. (For more, click here.)

Which of the data analyses conducted by the authors do you find most interesting, or most troubling? Do you think they represent the gender distribution in leadership at your agency?

I Do Solemnly Swear That I Will…

People in the private sector do not take an oath of office when they get a job. They get an offer, report to work, and that’s it.

For federal employees it is different. Reading so many articles about the inauguration that refer to the president-elect taking the oath of office on the 20th of January got me thinking about oaths and what they mean.

I have taken that oath of office as a civil service employee. Raising your right hand and swearing to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” is not something most people take lightly. It is a solemn oath and it means something to most people who take it.

The president becomes a federal employee by taking an oath prescribed by Article 2, Section 1, of the US Constitution. It says “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

 Judges, members of the House and Senate, political appointees, the military, and other federal employees take oaths of office that are required by Article VI of the Constitution, which says “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The Constitution does not prescribe the actual text of the Article VI oaths. For federal civil service employees, the oath is set forth by law in 5 U.S. Code § 3331, which reads as follows:
 “An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.””

The oath is relatively straightforward, but what does it mean? (For more, click here.)

Did any of the information in this article surprise you? Did it make you think any differently about your oath of office?

 

No Time to Wait: Building a Public Service for the 21st Century

In case after case, ranging from ensuring cyber safety to protecting the nation’s borders, the federal government faces profound problems in making government work for the American people. And in case after case, these problems share a common root cause: the federal government’s human capital system is fundamentally broken. The more complex and wicked problems become, the more government needs smart leaders with the skills to solve them. But the current system, too often, has become trapped in processes that keep leaders from leading.

There is no time to wait. The nation’s problems are too urgent. We need to build a human capital system that meeds the needs of the nation’s 21st century government and we need to start now.

What the federal government most needs, we believe, is… (For more, click here.)

Do you agree with the authors of this report? Which area do you believe most attention? Do you have other human capital ideas that would help your organization solve the problems facing them as they try to accomplish their mission?

Should the Government Fire More People and How Should They Do It?

Does the government fire enough people? Does it deal effectively with poor performers? Is the disciplinary and adverse action process effective?

At the risk of offending a few folks, I have to say the answer to all three questions is probably no. The government does not fire a large percentage of its employees in a typical year. The data is available in OPM’s excellent Fedscope tool. In Fiscal 2016, the number fired was 10,519. At the end of fiscal 2016 the government had 2,097,038 employees, so roughly 1 in 200  or 0.5% of employees were fired. If we look only at permanent employees, 9,579 of 1,951,334 employees were fired (1 in 204 or 0.49%). The VA fired 2,575 employees (1 in 145 or 0.69 percent) in FY2016.

Direct comparisons to the private sector are not easy, but if we compare the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) “layoff and discharge” rate we see that the private sector lays off or fires about 1.2 – 1.3 percent of employees. Government rates (adding in the small number of RIFs as well) are much lower than that of the private sector. However, the private sector numbers are lumping layoffs and discharges together, most likely because the line between those is often blurred. Companies often characterize removals as layoffs, while the government does not.

It is important to note that firing people is not the only measure of how agencies and companies deal with poor performance and misconduct. For more, click here.

Do you agree with Jeff Neal’s core principles for a governmentwide disciplinary/adverse action process? Why or why not? What would you add or subtract from the process?

A Playbook for User-Centered Hiring

A new analysis of government hiring found the “very people they need to make government more responsive to the public are the people driven away by the poor user experience.” …  Hiring managers routinely complain about the lack of qualified candidates for positions. Code for America saw this as a problem because in order for governments to serve the American public in the 21st century, the nonprofit believes governments need to be able to recruit 21st century talent. So, in the fall of 2016, Code for America started investigating ways governments could meet that challenge, by launching a talent initiative to study roadblocks governments face when trying to recruit the best talent for these positions. By interviewing 28 people in all parts of the job seeking process, from those who have a job in government to those considering a job in government, the study identified some common themes preventing good people from applying and getting jobs in government. For more, click here.

Do any of the common themes identified in this article prevent good people from applying and getting in your agency or organization? Would using a user-centered, data-driven approach to hiring help your agency better hire the employees it needs to accomplish its mission? If you were CHCO, how would you apply the information in this article to your organization’s hiring policies?

Government Warms to Continuous Monitoring of Personnel with Clearances

Days after Navy contractor Aaron Alexis murdered 12 people during a shooting rampage at the Washington Navy Yard on Sept. 16, 2013, Pentagon officials acknowledged they had neglected to follow up on a Rhode Island police report the previous month showing that Alexis, who died in a shootout with police, had complained of hearing voices. That turned out to be just one of many red flags in Alexis’ background that Navy officials and security clearance investigators were not aware of prior to the tragedy. Since then, officials have worked to significantly strengthen the way clearances are granted and managed. For more, click here.

What do you think about using of software programs to more thoroughly vet employees and contractors? What about continuously monitoring those who hold security clearances using social media? Are the such risks to privacy justified by the results?