The Politics of Employment Discrimination in the Federal Bureaucracy

THE federal government is the largest employer in the United States. In 1978, it employed over 2.4 million full-time civilian workers, of whom 31.1 percent were women, and 22.0 percent were classified as minority employees.' The evidence in several recent studies suggests that the earnings of minorities and women employed by the federal government are substantially lower than the earnings of "similar" white males; they also conclude that the extent of wage discrimination in the federal government is slightly less than that found in the private sector.2 Although these studies provide a useful description of the economic status of the various sex and race groups, they do not expand our understanding of the government's behavior in its hiring and placement of these groups. That is, these studies give little hint as to how government objectives are translated into federal employment policy. This paper shifts the focus of analysis from a comparison of federal and private racial and sexual wage differentials to a study of how different