In her three years working at the U.S. Census Bureau, Mónica García-Pérez remembers rarely seeing or hearing people like her.
By NPR
Dec 14, 2021
“I would never forget those years,” says the economist who was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and helped develop data analysis projects at the federal government’s largest statistical agency from 2006 to 2009 as a graduate student. “I created long-lasting friendships and long-lasting memories.”
García-Pérez says if anyone were to ask her about other Latinos she met inside the bureau’s headquarters in Suitland, Md., a suburb just southeast of Washington, D.C., she could name very few.
“You will see Latinos mostly in service work by the lunchroom, or you will hear Spanish in those areas,” she adds. “But I personally did not see that within the units that I interacted with.”
While the civil servants she did meet were, as García-Pérez puts it, “very loyal to do the right work” for the country’s once-a-decade head count and national surveys, she often wonders how a bureau with more racial and ethnic diversity could better produce the data that governments, along with businesses and researchers, rely on to understand the people living in the United States.
“I think what has been done has been done professionally,” García-Pérez says of the bureau’s work as the government’s main supplier of data. “It’s what could be done and what other discussion could be opened” if there were a workforce that actually mirrored the country’s demographics, she adds.
Starting next month – more than two centuries since the country’s first national count in 1790 – the bureau is expected to be led by the first Latino and second-ever person of color to head the U.S. census: Robert Santos, one of the country’s leading statisticians who is Mexican American and a Biden administration appointee confirmed by the Senate for a five-year term.
But under the bureau’s director, the permanent full-time staff (which does not include the temporary workers hired specifically for the decennial count) at the federal agency in charge of measuring the demographics of the U.S. still doesn’t reflect the country’s racial and ethnic diversity. And that’s especially true among its highest-ranking civil servants in the Senior Executive Service who run its day-to-day work.
An NPR analysis has found that close to 4 in 5 senior executives at the bureau identified as white and not Hispanic or Latino, according to the latest public data from June.
Nationally, people of color make up about 2 in 5 U.S. residents. But at the bureau, only about 1 in 5 executives identified as either American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black, Latino, Pacific Islander or multiracial. While there is a relatively high share of executives who identified as Black compared with other groups, people of color as a whole are underrepresented among these leaders.
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Read More: NPR – The federal agency that measures racial diversity is led mostly by white people
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