bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1990), pp. 20–22
he view still prevails in many corners of the Department that while women were once discriminated against, the tables have now turned and women are now at least treated equally, or even given special treatment in the Department. I would like to provide my perspective.
The blatant discrimination of bygone years is, of course, largely gone. But the problem of discrimination has not disappeared. What concerns many women officers is the much more subtle discrimination, or “hidden discrimination” that continues to persist in a very sophisticated Department. Much of what I believe needs to be put aright is what the Canadian Human Rights Commission has called systemic discrimination; that is, “practices that may not be obviously discriminatory in their formulation or nature, but that, in the results, have an adverse impact…” In short, what I am concerned about is the results, not just the perceived equality of the rules.
Being prepared to get at this kind of discrimination is not easy. It requires a clear understanding of employment equity issues by management; a firm commitment and clear signals by them to the Department that changes will be made and inaction will not be tolerated; aggressive staffing, remedial and other measures by all levels of management to bring about more acceptable results; and a sense of commitment by women themselves and by their male colleagues to bring about essential change.
In the American Foreign Service it took 13 years and $1.7 million for a class action suit by women in the State Department to succeed in obtaining remedial action in such key areas as recruitment, appraisal systems and job assignments. The class action suit brought by women officers against the State Department was able to show, for example, that the excruciatingly small number of appointments of women to deputy chief of mission positions over an eleven year period could only have arisen in a random throw of the dice once in 2500 times, given the number of women eligible for such positions. Similarly, the large number of assignments of women to less substantive jobs in the State Department could only have occurred randomly once in a million times. And the general background section of the Foreign Service Entrance Examination, on which women have tended to have significantly lower scores, was considered to be discriminatory. An examination of our Foreign Service would, I believe, reveal similar problems.
One need only look as far as the charts drawn up by the Public Service Commission comparing the representation of women in the management category across a wide range of Departments. It shows that in December 1988, the Department of External Affairs, with the single largest number of EX officers anywhere in the Government, rated 32nd in a survey of the 33 government departments that have more than 25 employees in the management category. Why does Department of External Affairs score a meagre 5.4% representation of women in the management category when the Privy Council Office and the Department of the Secretary of State can attain more than 30% women managers? And why is it that that reputed male bastion, the Department of National Defence, is able to achieve a higher representation of women managers than External? These figures would suggest that there is a prima facie case of discrimination in the Department. It would also appear to be an opinion shared by the Canadian Human Rights Commission which has selected this Department, along with DND and Revenue Canada, the three bottom rankers in the PSC survey, for a review of their equity data and employment systems.
The Department’s ranking in the PSC survey is particularly ironic, given the government’s international objectives for women. How can Canada be the most outspoken of all countries in the world in our insistence that professional women should comprise at least 30% of international secretariats when women rotational officers comprise only 15% of the Foreign Service Officer complement (EX(FS) and FS)? In our development assistance programme, we insist that each and every project be examined for its impact on women, including the benefits that women should derive from the project, and their participation in the development process. And, we insist on results in relatively short time frames. Why is it that we have more rigorous standards to ensure the equality of women in developing countries and in international secretariats than we do in the Canadian Foreign Service where management can directly influence the outcome?
Rotational women Foreign Service Officers for three consecutive years produced for management a paper on the profile of rotational women officers. They have used statistics prepared by the Personnel Branch, but also have taken a hard look at the management and other responsibilities of women at headquarters and at posts abroad. Some of the findings are as follows:
• At the end of 1988, there were 1172 Foreign Service (FS) Officers in all four streams. Overall, women comprised 19% of the FS group and 15% of the Foreign Service (FS and EX(FS)) groups. But they were mostly situated at the lower end of the FS and EX scales. 37% of the FSIDs were women; 28% of the FS1s were women; and 13% of the FS2s were women. In the EX(FS) management category, the statistics were worse. Of 404 EX(FS) employees, 16 were women. None had made it near the top ranks. There were no women EX(FS) 4s or 5s. 5.7% of the EX(FS)1s were women; 4.7% of the EX(FS)2s were women and 2% of the EX(FS)3s were women.
A closer inspection of the situation revealed that there had been relatively little progress in staffing women in the management ranks at headquarters by the end of 1988. For example:
– There were no women Deputy Ministers, only two women Assistant Deputy Ministers (only one of whom was rotational) and no women Director Generals.
– There were no women in the Social Affairs Stream in any management position (Deputy Director and above). This is particularly discouraging as women are disproportionately represented in this stream (50% of the new recruits in 1988 in Social Affairs were women, while women comprised 37% of new recruits overall).
– In the Development Assistance Stream, only 3 of 99 management-level positions at Headquarters were held by rotational women from that stream.
– Women did not get a fair share of Deputy Director positions. While FS2 women within the area of competition for promotion to the EX(FS)1 level represent approximately 10% of the total FS2 group in the area of competition, only 2.6% of women FS2s in 1987 and 6.8% in 1988 were Deputy Directors.
– At the FS1 and 2 level and even EX(FS) levels, disproportionately few women got the benefit of any special measures, such as stretch assignments. For example, no women FS2 officer in the Political/ Economic Stream has ever been made a Director in the Department, while some 15 FS2 male officers in the Political/ Economic Stream in the last few years have benefitted from this type of stretch assignment and most have, not surprisingly, been promoted to the EX(FS) category. No EX(FS)2 woman has been staffed into a Director-General job. Last year, half the EX (FS)2 men promoted to the EX(FS)3 level occupied Director- General positions.
Abroad, the Department’s still fairly limited : of rotational women in head of post (HOP) sitions has been highly visible and has on : whole worked reasonably well. (8 posins were filled by rotational women out of HOP positions filled by women). This is the statistic, of course, that most people think of when they assume that discrimination does not occur in the Department. Regrettably, it has not been complemented and backed up by the effective development of women at all the other critical stages of the career path in order for these HOP assignments not to become isolated cases of tokenism. A profile of posts abroad at the end of 1988 still showed a dearth of women in management positions below the Head of Post level. Thus, in the Political/ Economic Stream, only 2 of 81 programme managers abroad (Counsellor to Minister-level) are women. In Washington, our largest and most important Embassy, the most senior woman ranked twenty-eighth on the diplomatic list.
I have asked myself why the Department has so far been largely unable to develop its own female senior management. I have no definite answers, but I do have some plausible explanations about why this problem has persisted. The problem, and its solution, lies hidden in Departmental attitudes and its culture and in the way the job assignment and appraisal system work.
Virtually all women would testify that paternalistic and even chauvinistic attitudes still exist in the Department to some degree. A good number of male officers still seem to have difficulty, at least to some extent, in accepting women as peers or superiors and in relying on them in the same way as their male colleagues. Women have found most male supervisors to be less comfortable with women and, consequently, less at ease as their supervisors, often treating them somewhat differently from their male colleagues. For instance, I know of at least two cases where the particular Head of Post took each of his male officers with him on official tours, but never the women FS at the post. In my own experience at headquarters, none of my supervisors ever had lunch with me on a one-to-one basis, although we often lunched in somewhat larger groups. In other cases, I and other women, have rarely been asked to accompany our supervisors to appointments with senior-level officials. Many useful learning experiences were thus missed. Why did these experiences and other similar ones occur? I can only assume that there was some problem with the optics and comfort level for the male officers concerned, particularly in cases where the woman was young and single.
The personnel assignments process regrettably seems to be oblivious to this type of problem and unable to cope with the dual priority of assigning personnel to jobs and in ensuring adequate career development. Personnel Divisions tend to put virtually all their energies into simply filling vacancies — admittedly an important priority in a rotational system. Personnel managers are rewarded by the system for ensuring that vacancies are filled promptly by officers capable of doing the job. But, they are unfortunately not given any particular reward for ensuring the career development of officers — whether male or female.
The system tends in particular to be conservative and risk-adverse in staffing women, because they have generally less access to the “old boys’ network” and are consequently less well-known and have less credibility in comparison with their male peers. The end result is that women often do not get the same type of challenging assignments as many of their male colleagues. It is frankly easier to assign a woman to a job for which she is overqualified than to persuade a supervisor to accept her in an assignment where she has the qualifications but is unknown or untested. By contrast, a good number of my male colleagues have been given active boosts to their careers by being staffed by Personnel into high profile jobs, often as stretch assignments for high profile supervisors. Not surprisingly, they have done considerably better in terms of appraisals and promotions, not just because they are able officers, but because they acquired the on-the-job experience needed to make them even more effective. The Personnel system can, if it chooses, be an inordinately powerful tool in determining who gets what job, and consequently, who has a better opportunity to learn the Department’s work and to demonstrate his or her potential for promotion.
When I talk about the personnel system, I am not just referring to the Personnel Branch. The other critical players are Assistant Deputy Ministers, Director-Generals, and Heads of major Posts, who can make careers by requesting particular individuals for key job.
Other problems relate more specifically to the appraisal system. They also may be intertwined with our cultural values and the place and role of women in our society. Women, for instance, through their upbringing and culture, tend on the whole to be more modest than many of their male colleagues about their achievements. This means, I believe, that when requested to make their input to their appraisals, they tend to be overly modest in reporting their accomplishments, or at least, less prone to exaggerate. More seriously, in the cases where officers write part or all of their own appraisals, (an all too frequent occurence), women tend to under-rate themselves. In other cases, supervisors may under-evaluate a woman’s potential or mark her down in certain areas because he is less comfortable with her style of getting things done. He may be less willing or comfortable in coaching a woman officer about how to deal with a new or difficult situation or less willing to back up her decision or approach to a decision. Supervisors may also be less willing or less comfortable in making the “strategic decision” that a woman officer is ready for promotion and may be less prepared to write her appraisal accordingly.
Finally, there is the problem that any promotional system has a tendency to promote the type of individual that has proved successful in the past — in the Foreign Service, traditionally a male officer who has functioned well in a predominantly male culture. The written appraisal system used by the Foreign Service has an even deeper bias because it provides a second-hand view of the individual with inevitably some of the biases of the rater contained implicitly in the description of the individual’s performance.
How can we remedy the problems? There are two challenges to be addressed. The first challenge entails putting in place measures to ensure that women genuinely receive equal treatment and a fair share of career opportunities — for example, an equitable share of the deputy directorships. The second challenge entails the development of catch-up and remedial measures to overcome the disadvantages that women have historically faced and continue to face — for example, the use of the assignment process to enhance women’s career development opportunities. Government policy stipulates that employment equity entails “practices designed to eliminate and prevent disadvantages in employment for designated groups through such mechanisms as special measures which redress these disadvantages and (provide), in a meaningful way, equitable opportunities in employment”. The Department needs to work urgently on both these tasks. Some recommended approaches to rectifying past imbalances are:
• Very clear signals by senior managers to all levels of the Department that they are determined to make significant and rapid progress to increase the number of rotational
• At our major posts abroad there should be women entering the management category a conscious policy of staffing a woman into one of the top three or four positions. There is already an informal policy whereby a francophone occupies the number one or two position in these posts: This type of 22 bout de papier Vol. affirmative action should be extended to • More generally, senior management should review the measures that were successfully used in the 1970s to increase the representation of francophones at senior levels in the Foreign Service and, where appropriate, similar measures should be used for women. It should also look at other measures “to grow” women.
• For women at more junior levels, the Personnel Operations Bureau, with Senior Management, should be “pro-active” in assigning rotational women to positions which will maximize their abilities and effectiveness and enable them to compete for management positions and promotions on an equal basis with their male counterparts. Women should be encouraged to apply for assignments and senior managers should be encouraged to ask for and obtain good women for stretch assignments. Particular attention should be given to staffing women in traditionally male-dominated bureaus and very visible positions such as executive assistants to deputy ministers.
• It is also important to provide women with informal “mentors” early on in their careers and to assign them into jobs where they work for some of the more successful (and sympathetic) officers in the Department.
There is no better way “to learn the ropes” than by working with officers who “have succeeded” in the Department and who are willing to share the lessons of their success. It also helps to provide women with key entry points into “the old boys’ network”.
• The biases in the appraisal system need to be tackled. Special appraisal review committees could review appraisals to ensure women are fairly rated and that their ratings reflect their effectiveness and potential. Promotion boards might interview the top 20 or 25% of candidates so they can evaluate women candidates first-hand.
• Finally, better statistics are essential in measuring progress towards employment equity. Not all of these ideas may be feasible and a good many more might be equally or more effective in redressing discrimination in the department. What they do illustrate is that there is room for major change that will remedy the lot of women in the Foreign Service while retaining the excellence of the Foreign Service and career opportunities for both men and women.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1990), pp. 20–22. Read the rest of this issue →
