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Making Intelligence More Diverse, One Spy at a Time

Posted February 11, 2009

From James Bond to Jason Bourne, the spy business has long been portrayed as a white man's game. But the realities of the job demand a far more colorful cast. Patricia Taylor's job, as head of the intelligence community's Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity Office, is to ensure that America's spies and analysts are diverse enough for today's challenges. A former commandant of the National Cryptologic School—the country's code-making-and-breaking university—she now works for the director of national intelligence. Taylor recently sat down with U.S. News. Excerpts:

How diverse is the intelligence community?
Overall, about 22 percent of the IC workforce is minority, women account for about 40 percent, and persons with disabilities are under 5 percent. In all those categories, the IC has a greater percentage represented than the U.S. civilian labor force. But we're below the rest of the federal workforce and the U.S. population in most categories, especially for Hispanics and women, and we have underrepresentation in senior positions. The specifics are classified. The Defense Intelligence Agency has the highest representation of minorities, and the National Reconnaissance Office has the highest percentage of women.

Is diversity a priority for the IC?
We've met with agency directors and brought diversity statistics so they could address it like a line on a budget. Unless the direction to change comes from the top, you are going to have people lower down in the chain of command giving a "salute and wink" with no intention of changing. Now, about 30 percent of first-time hires across the IC are minorities.

How diverse is upper management?
We need to do better in senior levels and higher pay grades, especially in leadership positions in our mission areas—analysis, collection, and science and technology. Areas like support, acquisitions, human resources are the most diverse.

Why is diversity important in intelligence?
Research shows that diverse thinking teams make better decisions. The IC was suffering from groupthink—decisions made by people with similar backgrounds, who were raised the same and thought the same way about the world. We need people of different genders, races, cultural backgrounds, foreign language capabilities, ancestry and heritage, sexual orientation, and from different generations.

What's different about minority recruiting?
Minority recruiting is personal and labor intensive. We also have to overcome misperceptions based on the way the IC is portrayed in the media. In my old neighborhood [inner-city Cleveland], it might not go over so well if you tell people that you want to work for the CIA. We need to show who we are and what we can offer as employers.

How are the senior levels dealing with the changing workforce?
One thing we teach senior leaders to do is to speak in their own voices about diversity. When we are preparing speeches for the directors, we usually leave the first page blank and say, "Describe your personal experiences with diversity."

What story do you tell?
My grandfather, an uncle, and both of my parents were in the military, and it never really dawned on me, until I got in this assignment, that they all served in segregated corps. My mother was in the group of the first black Women's Army Corps soldiers to go overseas in World War II. My father has many stories about the pride in serving and the pain of segregation and discrimination.