With the anticipated announcement of Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) as nominee for Secretary of the Department of the Interior, President-elect Barack Obama is on track to possibly assemble the most ethnically diverse cabinet ever. However, with only two women named to the cabinet so far – Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) for State and Governor Janet Napolitano (D-AZ) for Homeland Security – Obama’s cabinet is even less gender balanced than the original cabinets of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
With today’s announcement of Salazar’s nomination and of the nomination of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head the Department of Agriculture, Obama has now named 13 of the 15 cabinet positions, leaving only the Departments of Labor and Transportation to be announced.
It was President Bill Clinton who famously said that he would assemble a cabinet that resembled America in 1993. Both he and George W. Bush gave positions to unprecedented numbers of women and minorities. In terms of diversity, the original cabinets of the two are perfect mirrors of each other. Clinton’s original cabinet included three women – Janet Reno at Justice, Donna Shalala at Health and Human Services, and Hazel O’Leary at Energy. Bush’s original cabinet also included three women – Gale Norton at Interior, Ann Veneman at Agriculture, and Elaine Chao at Labor.
Both Clinton and Bush also had five cabinet members who are racial or ethnic minorities, creating cabinets that were 36 percent minority. Both cabinets were significantly more diverse than the US population as a whole at the time. Twenty-three percent of the population claimed minority racial or ethnic heritage in the 2000 census and 19 percent did so in 1990.
Today an estimated 34 percent of the US population identifies as a racial or ethnic minority and so the expectation for the nation’s first non-white President to select a diverse cabinet is even higher. His current picks include five who are members of racial or ethnic minority groups, creating a cabinet that is 38 percent minority.
All three recent have fallen far short of creating cabinets that reflect a gender balance of 50-50. The original cabinets of both Bush and Clinton were 79 percent male and 21 percent female. Obama’s current cabinet is only 15 percent female. Whether this reflects a dearth of qualified and/or interested female candidates for cabinet positions or sexism on the part of the male presidents is unknown, but it is clear that a glass ceiling still exists in the political world.
But our president-elect and his two immediate predecessors are still doing much better than the corporate world where only 13 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by female CEOs. That’s just 2.6 percent and it’s the highest number ever.
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