America’s diplomatic corps has a “much better” track record of diversity than most U.S. institutions, according to a newly appointed senior State Department official.
“Most institutions in the United States are not where we would want them to be in terms of diversity,” Kiron Skinner, who took over in September as the director of policy planning, told the Washington Examiner in a recent interview. “But given some the trends in the U.S. against diversity — especially racial diversity — the State Department is doing much better.”
Skinner arrived as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is trying to fill numerous vacancies while overseeing tricky negotiations in hotspots around the world; her predecessor, Brian Hook, is now the special envoy for Iran. But the State Department leadership team remains largely “white and male,” leading to complaints that Pompeo is disregarding diversity at the expense of diplomatic effectiveness.
“Diversity is not a priority for this administration. It’s not on their agenda,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, told Foreign Policy. “We can’t have a foreign service in which the world sees and thinks our entire leadership is white and male.”
Skinner, who is African-American, rejected that charge. “Everyone wants to see more [diversity],” she said in a phone interview. “Is that a priority for the secretary? It’s my sense that it is. I think me joining the State Department is one example of it — in a leadership role, on the Seventh Floor, near Mahogany Row, running the historic think tank shop for the State Department.”
President Trump’s 119 diplomatic picks include 88 men, FP noted, while more than 90 percent of the nominees are white. But the State Department notes that the newest career diplomats are much more diverse. In fiscal year 2017, “21.8 percent of all Foreign Service Officer hires were African-American,” according to a State Department spokesperson, who added that “11.4 percent of all Foreign Service Officer hires were Hispanic.”
But new hires don’t solve the shortage of diversity in the upper ranks, which Skinner agrees is a problem. “I don’t think the United States can project its values, ideals, its institution, and its prosperity to the rest of the world without greater diversity,” she said.
There are no simple solutions, Skinner adds. “Part of the issue is retention,” she said. New entrants need to believe that they can work hard and have a fruitful career. Pompeo needs to make progress on building that team quickly, perhaps by hiring individuals such as Skinner from outside the department, without undercutting the career ladder that those young diplomats aspire to climb.
“I’m actually just honored and happy that I’m on the Seventh Floor because part of retention is seeing people who look like you, that have backgrounds like you, that don’t come from just either coast or elite institutions,” Skinner said.
That imperative lends significance to the appointment of Michele Sison to serve as a career ambassador, one of the most senior positions in the State Department. “[Sison] is a Filipina-American woman who has spent the past 36 years as a Foreign Service Officer,” a State Department spokesperson said.
She’s hiring a policy planning staff that reflects that position, with the goal of fostering the kind of “intellectual diversity” that comes from a team of people who hails from places as disparate as “the broader Middle East” and middle America. “Many have lived on the African continent and have engaged for decades on parts of Asia or Latin America,” Skinner added.
And the Policy Planning team should influence the various bureaus of the State Department as they staff up and carry out their respective missions. But the long-term strength of the department with respect to diversity will come from a pair of programs devoted to recruiting a talented and diverse pool of foreign service officers, the Pickering and Rangel Fellowships.
“Through the Rangel Program and the Pickering Fellow program, the State Department has actually had an institutional way of retaining and mentoring people,” Skinner said.
The Pickering Fellowship was established in 1992; the Rangel program followed a decade later. Trump’s nominee to serve as ambassador to Moldova, Derek Hogan — a 1993 Pickering Fellow — is on pace to become the first alumnus of either program to serve as the top U.S. diplomat in a foreign country.
“These are phenomenal programs that I think actually could be models for institutions across American society,” Skinner said. “From those ranks, I think we’ll see even more reach the ambassadorial level and take leadership positions at the State Department.”
