Uzra Zeya is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. She previously served as charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission at U.S. Embassy in Paris, and as acting assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

When I joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1990, I used to joke that all my South Asian-American colleagues and I could fit comfortably at a table for four. With my brownish skin, unruly hair and seriously non-Anglo-Saxon name, I didn’t resemble many foreigners’ vision of an American diplomat: white, male, perhaps with a monocle to finish off the look. While serving at U.S. embassies in Jamaica, Egypt, Syria, Oman or India, I often was taken to be a local—a mix-up I would use as a teaching moment, to explain that anyone, regardless of color or origin, could become an American and aspire to join our diplomatic corps. A young Syrian’s reaction captured the usual outcome of such exchanges: “The fact that you’re an American diplomat is what I love about America.”

The State Department became less of a pale male club under secretaries like Colin Powell and Hillary Clinton—who championed diversity and equality as institutional values—and thanks to recruitment programs like the Pickering and Rangel fellowships, which brought hundreds of talented officers from under-represented groups into public service. As of June 2018, Asian-Americans represented 6.8 percent of Foreign Service generalists, slightly above the Asian-American share of the population in the 2010 U.S. Census, while Hispanic (6.0 percent), African-American (5.4 percent) and Native American representation (0.3 percent) lagged at levels well below their share of the population. Our progress on diversity was far from adequate, but for most of my career, across both Democratic and Republican administrations, I could say with confidence that my government was striving to build a diplomatic corps that looked more like America as a whole. As the daughter of Indian-American immigrants proud to be the first member of my family born in the United States, I rose through the State Department’s ranks without perceiving that my ethnicity, gender or religion impeded my career.


That is, until the Trump administration. In 2017, as the media ran out of synonyms for “implosion” in describing Rex Tillerson’s tenure as secretary of state, a quieter trend unfolded in parallel: the exclusion of minorities from top leadership positions in the State Department and embassies abroad.

This shift quickly became apparent in the department’s upper ranks. In the first five months of the Trump administration, the department’s three most senior African-American career officials and the top-ranking Latino career officer were removed or resigned abruptly from their positions, with white successors named in their places. In the months that followed, I observed top-performing minority diplomats be disinvited from the secretary’s senior staff meeting, relegated to FOIA duty (well below their abilities), and passed over for bureau leadership roles and key ambassadorships.

But it was not just a matter of turnover among a few top officials. According to my analysis of public data from the American Foreign Service Association, 64 percent of Trump‘s ambassadorial nominees so far have been white non-Hispanic males, a 7 percentage point increase from the eight years of the Obama administration. President Trump stands out from his six predecessors in his failure so far to nominate a single African-American female ambassador; African-American women made up 6 percent of all ambassadors under President Barack Obama and 5 percent under President George W. Bush, who had two African-American secretaries of state. Meanwhile, from September 2016 to June 2018, the share of African-Americans in the Senior Foreign Service—the top ranks from which most career ambassadorial nominees are drawn—dropped from 4.6 percent to 3.2 percent.

A new glass ceiling is also thinning the ranks of female ambassadors, who represent 26 percent of Trump nominees so far, 2 percentage points above the overall share in the Bush administration but a 7 percentage point drop from the Obama administration. A 25-year upward trend that saw the percentage of female ambassadors increase with every administration since President Bill Clinton has now been reversed.

The State Department says it is working to fix all this. According to spokeswoman Heather Nauert, Secretary Mike Pompeo “has placed incredible emphasis on staffing up the State Department and increasing diversity as well as reinvigorating and restoring the finest diplomatic corps in the world.” Although the department did not dispute the decline in minority and female ambassador nominees, an official said the percentage of African Americans, Hispanics and women hired as Foreign Service officers had increased from 2016 to 2017. That’s an encouraging sign at the entry level, but it does not address reduced minority representation at the senior level. With dozens of ambassadorial and other senior positions vacant, there is still time for Secretary Pompeo to reverse the slide in diversity among the department’s leadership; it’s worth noting that the Trump administration is not even two years in, while Obama and Bush each had eight years to shape the department’s top ranks. But up to now, Foggy Bottom’s upper echelons are looking whiter, more male and less like America.

In my own case, I hit the buzz saw that Team Trump wielded against career professionals after leading the U.S. Embassy in Paris through three major terrorist attacks over three years and after planning President Trump’s Bastille Day visit. Upon returning to Washington, as accolades for the president’s visit poured in, I was blocked from a series of senior-level jobs, with no explanation. In two separate incidents, however, colleagues told me that a senior State official opposed candidates for leadership positions—myself and an African-American female officer—on the basis that we would not pass the “Breitbart test.” One year into an administration that repudiated the very notion of America I had defended abroad for 27 years, I knew I could no longer be a part of it, and I left government earlier this year.

A vast body of research has shown that organizations are more successful and innovative when they employ diverse talent; national security is no exception. As a March 2018 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded, “The United States must draw on its entire population to maintain its leadership position in international affairs. At the moment, it is not leveraging its inherent comparative advantage: its own people.”

Over the course of my career, I witnessed the remarkable impact that diverse teams—women and men of all backgrounds—had in formulating the multilateral response to the 9/11 attacks, assisting victims of terrorism, developing global protections for human rights defenders under siege, halting the spread of pandemic disease, and transforming the relationship between the world’s largest and oldest democracies. Diversity is essential for diplomacy because of the human element that the job requires. As a reporting officer in the Middle East, for example, I was able to engage local women who were off-limits to male diplomats. And I have no doubt that my ability to connect with foreign audiences, from India to France, was aided in part by their appreciation of my own immigrant story. A less diverse diplomatic corps, especially at the top level, undercuts American national security by narrowing the scope of engagement at embassies abroad, constricting the flow of new ideas and perspectives, and contradicting the example of America as a champion of equality and opportunity for all.

But it is difficult to leverage diversity with a Senior Foreign Service that remains 88.8 percent white and more than two-thirds male. If the State Department is not going to acknowledge this problem, Congress should insist on a serious commitment to diversity in American diplomacy from Secretary Pompeo—by demanding answers for the slide in minority and female senior representation at State, accountability if any officials have violated equal opportunity laws, prohibitions on political retaliation and protections for employees who report wrongdoing.

No one should harbor illusions, however, that a president who relies on “central casting” to make hiring decisions and routinely disparages African-Americans, Muslims, women and immigrants would champion those who don’t resemble him. The most meaningful step toward rebuilding a State Department that looks like America is electing a president who cherishes our legacy as a nation of immigrants and diversity as one of many strengths that make our diplomatic corps—and America as a whole—truly great.