Female FBI recruits are mistreated, lawsuit says

WASHINGTON — 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, Virginia, 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 tactics training. Some continue to work for the FBI but not as agents.

Some of the women said they encountered repeated problems with tactical instructors. They are almost all men, given no guidance, who can target any recruit for dismissal.