Via Reuters
The CIA has consistently failed to promote minorities into its leadership ranks and progress in building diversity at the top of the spy agency has largely stalled in the last decade, according to a CIA-commissioned report released on Tuesday.
“Agency leaders, managers and supervisors do not prioritize diversity in leadership,” the report said.
“This fact is evident at the highest levels of the CIA, wherein the most senior positions – with few notable exceptions – are consistently occupied by white male career officers,” it said.
Among the report’s most striking findings is that since 2008, the percentage of minorities hired by the CIA has declined to below what is needed to sustain current minority representation in the agency’s workforce.
It also found that a 1984-2004 increase in African-American officers at the agency’s top rung, known as the Senior Intelligence Service, has been reversed in the last 10 years.
CIA Director John Brennan, who ordered the study in December 2013, said he was committed to improving hiring, promotion and training of a diverse workforce. Brennan described that as vital to the spy agency’s mission of understanding and predicting events in an increasingly complex world.
An insufficiently diverse workforce “has lead to less than comprehensive appreciation of the world as we know it,” the CIA chief said. Other perspectives are needed, he said, “so we do not fall prey to group-think.”
Since its 1947 founding, the CIA has often been seen as a bastion of white males – often educated at Ivy League universities.