The workplace depicted in the 1980 movie Nine to Five (described in detail in the introduction to this book) is a veritable wonderland of sex discrimination. Sexual harassment, pay discrimination, rampant stereotyping, and family-unfriendly policies, to take just the most obvious examples. How much difference has thirty years made? To read this book, one might conclude not much. A recent study of the federal workforce depicts a similarly dismal scene, in which female federal employees labor on unfair terrain and continue to experience what might seem to be dated problems of discrimination.

GENDER AND THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE

In 2010, the EEOC convened a working group to “identify the obstacles that remain in the federal workplace that hinder equal employment opportunities for women.” The EEOC is broadly charged with implementing federal antidiscrimination laws in the workplace, in both the public and the private sector. Although federal employees have the same substantive protections as other employees, they are subjected to different procedural requirements for claiming them. There is, thus, a separate office within the EEOC to deal with the federal workforce, and it is this office that convened the working group as part of the EEOC's “overall mission to eradicate discrimination in both the federal sector and private sector workplace.”

Given that the federal government is the nation's largest employer – employing nearly four and a half million people – it makes sense to focus a bright light on the challenges that still face female employees. (By comparison, even Walmart, the nation's largest private sector employer, employs only 1.3 million people in the United States.) The working group gathered together federal EEO directors, federal “affinity” groups like Federally Employed Women, nonfederal advocacy groups, and a social scientist from Harvard. Together, these “dialogue partners” considered the most serious impediments to women's equality and came up with suggestions for eliminating them.

In broad brush, the working group found that while women have made significant advances in the federal workforce, they still experience inequality on a variety of fronts. The report highlighted six “obstacles” to equal opportunity, as follows:

1. • Inflexible workplace policies create challenges for women in the federal workforce with caregiver obligations.

2. • Higher-level and management positions remain harder to obtain for women.

3. • Women are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields in the federal workforce.