This report documents findings and recommendations from a project examining why women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups are underrepresented in the active-duty Coast Guard. 1 The researchers used a mixed-method approach to identify root causes of underrepresentation of these populations and made recommendations for strategies that the Coast Guard can adopt to improve its ability to reflect the racial, ethnic, and gender makeup of the United States, resulting in a more diverse Coast Guard.The summary of this report, which highlights our key findings and recommendations, will likely be most useful for decisionmakers. Readers with more-detailed interests will find value in the chapters and appendixes, which provide detailed explanations of study findings, recommendations, and our methodology. This research was sponsored by the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Diversity and Inclusion (CG-127) and conducted within the Personnel and Resources Program of the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC), a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) operated by the RAND Corporation.
About the Homeland Security Operational Analysis CenterThe Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Section 305 of Public Law 107-296, as codified at 6 U.S.C. § 185) authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security, acting through the Under Secretary for Science and Technology, to establish one or more FFRDCs to provide independent analysis of homeland security issues. The RAND Corporation operates HSOAC as an FFRDC for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under contract HSHQDC-16-D-00007.The HSOAC FFRDC provides the government with independent and objective analyses and advice in core areas important to the department in support of policy development, decision making, alternative approaches, and new ideas on issues of significance. The HSOAC FFRDC also works with and supports other federal, state, local, tribal, and public-and private-sector organizations that make up the homeland security enterprise. The HSOAC FFRDC's research is undertaken by mutual consent with DHS and is organized as a set of discrete tasks. This report presents the results of research and analysis conducted under task order 70Z02319FPPE04500, Holistic Study and Analysis for Recruiting and Retention of Underrepresented Minorities. 1 The Coast Guard refers to women and members of racial and ethnic minority groups as underrepresented minorities (URMs). We recognize that minority itself is often used as shorthand for historically underrepresented or historically marginalized rather than for actual numeric minority, but we use URM in this report in keeping with Coast Guard terminology.Throughout this report, any designation of gender, race, or ethnicity is self-reported by personnel. In addition, in this report, we use a binary gender construct (men and women) because this aligns with Coast Guard personnel data collection.