Women allege unequal treatment at Quantico
FBI instructors don’t punish men for same mistakes, complaint says
Danielle Snider was sailing through her training to be an FBI agent last year, passing her fitness, academic and firearms tests. Then came the last phase: training on tactics like entering a house and confronting an armed attacker.
Snider, an Air Force Academy graduate, stumbled. In one day, instructors at the FBI’s sprawling facility in Quantico, Va., wrote her up four times. With less than two weeks to go before graduation, she was bounced from the course in January.
But in one instance, a man in training with her made a similar mistake and it was overlooked, she said. It was part of a pattern, she and other women who failed out of the academy said, in which instructors — almost all men — scrutinized them more closely because they were women and treated men differently when they erred.
“Everyone is making mistakes,” said Snider, 30, who found another job with the federal government as an investigator. “I felt it wasn’t the same playing field for women. I think it is fundamentally unfair.”
Snider is among a dozen women who accused the FBI of gender discrimination at its training academy, detailing their allegations in a complaint last month to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. One of the women also claimed she suffered discrimination because of her race and another because of a disability.
Snider, along with nine of the other women, washed out of the academy during the tactics training. Some continue to work for the FBI but not as agents.
“Female trainees are singled out in group tactical exercises because they are perceived as being weak and prone to failure,” they wrote in the complaint. “Male trainees are provided multiple avenues for success, in spite of their errors. Male trainees are often permitted to retake tactical exams when female trainees are denied the opportunity to do so.”
The FBI declined to comment on the complaint. In a statement, the bureau said it was “prioritizing advertising and recruiting aimed at women both nationally and through the 56 field offices.” The FBI also said the percentage of applicants to be agents who were women had increased, from 22 percent in the fiscal year that ended in September 2017 to 26 percent the following year. It hopes to reach 33 percent over the next year.
For years, the FBI has struggled to add more female agents. Women composed only a fifth of the bureau’s 13,500 agents as of October. About 44 percent of the FBI’s 35,000 employees are women. The FBI has set goals to hire more women but made no recruitment plan, the Justice Department inspector general found in a June report on gender equity in federal law enforcement from 2011-16. In response, the FBI noted “a mild increase in female applicants” but acknowledged that the total was “still short of our stated goal.”
The FBI will continue to fall short unless it tackles the issues the women outlined in their complaint, said David J. Shaffer, a lawyer for the women.
“It is hard enough to recruit adequate numbers of women for these positions,” Shaffer said. “This destroys the FBI’s ability to even come close to a representative population and makes a joke of their diversity goals.”
The real starting point for new agents begins in Quantico, about an hour’s drive from Washington. Just getting accepted as a new agent is difficult; only 6 percent of applicants are accepted for basic training, which typically lasts about 20 weeks. The tactical training includes scenarios at Hogan’s Alley, a mock town at the academy.
“The training at Hogan’s Alley is not easy,” said Kurt Crawford, a former FBI employee who worked with the training division at Quantico for 30 years until his retirement in April. “It’s some of the most realistic training. It pulls together everything you’ve learned. You’re forced to make tough decisions.”
Hogan’s Alley has cost otherwise-qualified recruits a shot at being an FBI agent, he said, calling it “the final proving ground.”
Snider said she had lost interest in the FBI because of her experience. “When a woman makes a mistake at the FBI, she’s incompetent,” she said. “When a guy makes a mistake, it is just a mistake.”
According to the FBI, 24 percent of the new agents in training this year were women.
Some of the women who filed the complaint said they encountered repeated problems with tactical instructors. They are almost all men, given no guidance and can target any recruit for dismissal, according to the complaint.
“The subjective evaluations by these male instructors results in female trainees being written up and subsequently dismissed at a rate significantly and disproportionately higher than their male counterparts,” the complaint said.