RACIAL, GENDER, AND PROFESSIONAL DIVERSIFICATION IN THE FOREST-SERVICE FROM 1983 TO 1992

The United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service traditional ly has been dominated by white, male foresters, particularly in its pr ofessional and leadership ranks. Beginning in the mid-1970s, however, civil rights legislation, lawsuits, and statutes that mandated interdi sciplinary planning collectively impelled the agency to begin diversif ying by race, gender, and profession. This study attempts to quantify the progress the agency has made in workforce diversification since th e early 1980s by grouping Forest Service job series into categories an d tracking changes in these categories over rime. The study reveals th at the numbers of employees in ''nontraditional'' Forest Service field s (e.g., the social and biological sciences) increased markedly, but t hat these employees remain vastly outnumbered by employees in traditio nal fields such as forestry. The number of women in the agency also in creased greatly, but women made much greater gains in administrative s upport positions than in jobs that put them in the pipeline for leader ship positions. They remain vastly overrepresented in clerical and adm inistrative positions and highly underrepresented in professional and technical positions. People of color made gains in nearly all job cate gories, but, like women, remain significantly overrepresented in jobs that will not lead to leadership positions. Thus, while aggregate numb ers show greater diversity in the Forest Service workforce, a more det ailed analysis reveals that the leadership ranks are still the domain of white, male foresters.