WASHINGTON—Today, The Heritage Foundation published a new report titled “Is the State Department Using “DEIA” to Discriminate Against Men?” The report examines the Biden administration’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) policies at work in the State Department and finds that they appear to discriminate against Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) based on immutable characteristics. The report concludes that women have a clear promotion advantage over men in all five occupational concentrations within the agency.  

Heritage Senior Research Fellow, former Foreign Service Officer, and author of the report, Simon Hankinson, made the following statement:  

“The Administration’s radical DEIA agenda has all but dismantled equal opportunities and treatment within the State Department.

“This report exposes the administration’s pattern—under the guise of ‘equity’—of promoting women at higher rates than men, with no logical explanation other than preference based on sex alone.

“The agency’s current path opens the Department to legal action by employees. Such discrimination lawsuits have been filed in the past. Today’s findings urge corrective action to restore merit-based promotion before that happens again.” 

Heritage Vice President of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, Victoria Coates, added: 

“American women fought for generations for equal treatment of both sexes and all races in the Federal workplace. This is no time to abandon that core value and sanction discrimination against men. DEI has been a cancer undermining our Federal workforce across the government, and should be eradicated by the incoming administration—starting with the State Department.”  

Below are some of the main takeaways from the report:  

• In 2023, this promotion advantage in favor of women existed in all five Foreign Service career tracks, ranging from 3 percent for Economic officers to 13 percent for Management officers. In the case of Management officers, nearly one in three women were promoted compared to fewer than one in five men. 

• In 2020, 2021, and 2022, women in the Foreign Service were also promoted on average at a higher rate than men across most specialties and grades. This pattern goes back two decades. 

• It is possible, though extremely unlikely, that women on average are simply better at their jobs, in every career track, over many years. A more plausible explanation is that the officers grading them have been trained and incentivized to focus on historical bias and advance “equity”—a preference that has been underscored in the Biden-Harris Administration.

• President Joe Biden made DEIA a major priority in his administration. On his first day in office, he issued an Executive Order on “Advancing Racial Equity,” and later, a second executive order requiring each agency to “establish a position of chief diversity officer,” and “take steps to increase diversity in the Federal employment pipeline.” 

• There are several ways to prevent bias in the promotion process. The most urgent is removing name, sex, and other irrelevant information from candidate promotion files to ensure that individuals are being compared fairly with regard only to job performance.