Gender and skin color count when seeking work or contracts with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), where leaders are working to build a workforce with well-balanced diversity.
The information is tracked through the SEC’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI), which was established in 2011 under former President Barack Obama as a requirement of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. While the U.S. Treasury must provide Congress a report each year, other federal departments, agencies, and commissions within the U.S. government are not mandated to prepare a report.
That is why other departments are in various stages of tracking this diversity, equity, and inclusion data. Some just started writing guidance in 2021 or 2022 for how to collect and present the data. Others provide different pieces of data, making comparison across the entire government impossible.
“This is our biggest complaint as a diversity watchdog group for government,” Mark Hanis, co-founder of Inclusive America, told The Epoch Times. “It is 100 percent apples to oranges. No one is [tracking]. Or those that are [tracking], are not doing it in a standardized way. We’ve been trying to fill that gap and advocating that government should maintain a dashboard for real time demographic information.”
Hanis describes Inclusive America as a nonprofit, working to make sure the government looks like its people. He says some of the best government jobs are never publicly advertised, and that applicants have to know someone to get hired.
Slight Changes in SEC Diversity
The SEC has slightly more minorities, accounting for 35.9 percent of its workforce in 2022, compared to 32.5 percent in the civilian labor force, for which the report used 2018 as the most recent available data.The report covers fiscal years 2020–2022.
During that time, there were 4 percent fewer white supervisors and managers at the SEC; 11.9 percent more black supervisors; 15.3 percent more Asian supervisors; and 19.6 percent more Hispanic supervisors and managers. As for gender, there were 0.2 percent fewer men and 2.5 percent more women.
It is helpful to consider the actual numbers that go with the above percentages.
In 2022, SEC supervisors and managers numbered 551 men, 367 women, 649 white, 94 black, 55 Hispanic, and 113 Asian, plus seven employees in the “other” category, which is likely multiple races.
The report offers similar numbers for other worker categories.
Diversity goes beyond the workforce. It is considered when awarding contracts. By promoting increased use of minority-owned and women-owned businesses, these businesses saw more government contracts year-over-year. The report shows a slight increase in awards from fiscal year 2021 ($226.9 million) compared to 2022 ($233.5 million).
Some of its hiring contractors are using recruitment teams exclusively focused on expanding a diverse applicant pipeline, the report said.
Cookbook for Diversity
In addition to tracking employee skin tones and genders, through OMWI, taxpayers provided the following courses to managers and employees in 2022: Language of Inclusion; Gender Inclusive Language: What It Means and Why Your Use of Pronouns Matters; and Understanding and Mitigating Microaggressions in the Workplace. Hundreds of SEC employees attended these trainings, the report said.Another inclusion effort is the SEC’s formation of the 60-person Diversity Council which meets bimonthly. In 2022, the council heard various presentations and formed two subcommittees tasked with writing equity reports.
And to increase connectedness and a sense of belonging, the Diversity Council recently launched “SEC Favorite Family Cookbook: Holidays and Special Occasions.”
“This is a follow-up to the SEC’s highly successful 2020 ‘SEC Favorite Family Recipes Cookbook,’ which allowed SEC employees across the agency to share what they have been making during the pandemic or their favorite recipes, along with any stories or photos they wanted to share,” the report said.
The mission of the SEC is to oversee about $115 trillion in securities trading on U.S. equity markets annually.
The SEC also formed the UnCovering Task Force, an agency-wide cultural change effort designed to encourage employees to bring their “authentic, whole selves to work.” In 2022, the UnCovering Task Force hosted an open house and a separate briefing and training on “Bringing Your Authentic Self to Work to Foster a Connected Culture.” The training, attended by 114 employees, offered sessions on being more authentic at work; increasing job satisfaction; and improving productivity and mission effectiveness.
OMWI also launched a resource portal for easy access to educational material, reading, training, and videos on diversity, equity and inclusion.
Employee Affinity Groups
Employee affinity groups bring together people in the workplace who have something in common, to cultivate a workplace culture that attracts diversity. This is done by separating employees, except for white employees, according to race or other minority identifier.In fiscal year 2022, the following employee affinity groups were active at the SEC: the African American Council; American Indian Heritage Committee; Asian American and Pacific Islander Committee; Caribbean American Heritage Committee; Disability Interests Advisory Committee; Hispanic and Latino Opportunity, Leadership, and Advocacy Committee; Pride Alliance; Veterans Committee; and Women’s Committee.
These groups helped coordinate more than 43 SEC-sponsored programs in observance of their affinity. For example, the report said, the SEC’s Pride Alliance hosted “Let’s Celebrate Pride Month” with Justin Yoder, founder and president of “LGBT Outdoor” to kick off the June celebration of Pride Month by sharing his organization’s efforts to encourage and enable members of the LGBT community to get outdoors and connect with nature and the world around them, the report said.
