Improving Social Equity Within Public Organizations: Authority Differentials as Reference Points for Fostering Diversity and Inclusion Within U.S. Federal Agencies

Fostering diversity and inclusion (D&I) is a major challenge confronting the contemporary American administrative state. The asymmetric distribution of authority within U.S. federal agencies is critical for understanding employee perceptions of agency D&I efforts. Leveraging data from approximately 2.51 million U.S. federal employees across 105 agencies between 2010 and 2019, the statistical evidence demonstrates that authority differentials, reflected by the relative gender and racial balance of supervisory and non-supervisory personnel within U.S. federal agencies, predict employees’ evaluations of agency efforts at fostering D&I. Although these authority differentials have similar effects on employee D&I evaluations for both men and women, minority employees exhibit more sanguine assessments of agency D&I efforts than compared to non-minority colleagues predicated on such authority differentials. The statistical relationship between authority differentials and employees’ agency D&I evaluations is most pronounced for women minority employees, as well as for those holding supervisory positions.