Room at the top

White men continue to dominate the highest levels of the civil service, but their numbers dropped in the 1990s while the number of women and minorities rose, according to a new report issued by the General Accounting Office.

The number of white males in the Senior Executive Service dropped

Diversity in the federal workforce provides a wider variety of perspectives when crafting policy, making decisions and solving problems said GAO's report, "Senior Executive Service: Diversity Increased in the Past Decade" (GAO-01-377).

Government-wide, the number of women and minority senior executives grew from 1990 to 1999, but there are still proportionally more white women than minority women, the report found. Each of the 24 largest federal agencies gained more women in the 1990s. The State Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were the only agencies that did not have an increase in minority career executives.

GAO cautioned readers not to draw too many conclusions from its results. The EEOC was critical of GAO's methodology, and even GAO admitted that it wasn't perfect. "While our methodology is not perfect, it was the best we could devise considering the available data," the report said.

-Tanya N Ballard