New York Times l Once Hailed as Army Pioneer, Now Battling to Stay on the Job
May 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
“The Army was my life. These leaders, they almost destroyed me," said Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King of her removal from her commandant post.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — When Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King was named the first female commandant of the Army’s elite drill sergeant school in 2009, proponents of gender equality in the military hailed the news as a watershed.
But it did not take long for the grumbling to start. Students who flunked out of the school complained that she set unfair standards. Some of her own instructors said she rigidly enforced old-fashioned rules. Traditionalists across the service asked: how could a woman with no experience in combat manage the Army’s only school for training the trainers who prepare recruits for war?
She says she tried to ignore the criticism, but her superiors did not. Last November, they suspended Sergeant Major King, forbidding contact with students or staff and opening an investigation into what they called the “toxic” environment at the school. As that review dragged on, she says she felt like a criminal: isolated, publicly humiliated and so despondent that friends worried that she might hurt herself.
Sergeant Major King headed the Army's drill sergeant school at Fort Jackson, S.C.
Last week she decided to fight back, filing a complaint with the Army asserting that her male supervisors had mistreated her because she is a woman, and asking for a Congressional investigation. Four days later, the Army reinstated her, saying that the accusations against her — including that she had abused her power — could not be substantiated.
Now, just a week from the scheduled end of her tour as commandant of the school, located here at Fort Jackson, and three months from mandatory retirement, Sergeant Major King, 50, is making clear that she is not ready to go quietly. In an interview this week, she described what she says was a yearlong campaign by two superiors — a command sergeant major based in Virginia and his boss, a major general — to undermine her authority and encourage her drill instructors to turn against her.
“The Army was my life,” she said. “These leaders, they almost destroyed me.”
Sergeant Major King’s direct supervisor, Command Sgt. Maj. John R. Calpena, was traveling on Thursday and was not available for comment. Maj. Gen. Richard C. Longo, the former head of Initial Military Training for the Army, now deployed to Afghanistan, declined to be interviewed, citing Sergeant Major King’s legal action, known as an Article 138 complaint.
To her supporters, Sergeant Major King’s case underscores how difficult it remains for even the toughest of women to ascend into high-profile jobs in the Army, where combat experience remains the essential currency. Because women cannot serve in combat, they are automatically handicapped in establishing their leadership bona fides, her supporters say.
Her critics assert that Sergeant Major King, who spent the last decade mainly in training jobs on domestic bases, should at least have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan with a noncombat support unit. But she argues that if she had, she would not have gained much experience useful to training drill sergeants.
“At the schoolhouse, you’re training in doctrine,” she said. “You don’t have to go to combat to teach a sergeant how to transform a civilian into a soldier.”
“We certainly have a lot of work to do” to integrate women into high-ranking jobs, she continued. “Look at how I was treated. In public, in the open.”
Small, wiry and intense, Sergeant Major King does not seem the type to shout discrimination easily. The daughter of a North Carolina sharecropper, with 31 years in uniform, she thrived like few other women in the Army, earning top scores in fitness tests and evaluations, and becoming an unabashed expert in the minutia of Army regulations. Divorced and without children, she called the Army her family, and bore her nickname, No Slack, proudly.
As commandant, Sergeant Major King recruited high-performing drill sergeants from training bases like Fort Benning, Ga., and Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., to be teachers at Fort Jackson, then oversaw the rigorous 10-week course that produces new drill sergeants.
In her first months, she was pushed by her commander then, Lt. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, to methodically enforce basic standards on everything from body fat to rifle handling, which he felt had declined. She ordered her staff to reject candidates who were even slightly overweight or unfit and to reprimand instructors for infractions like discourteous behavior and wearing their hair too long. The failure rate for drill-instructor recruits rose.
“We were trying to maintain very high standards,” General Hertling said in an interview. “I think she did a very good job.”
But as soon as General Hertling transferred to become head of Army forces in Europe in early 2011, things changed. “It was like a duck hunt,” said Sgt. Maj. Robert Maggard, Sergeant Major King’s deputy and staunchest supporter.
Sergeant Major King in 2009, the year she became the first female commandant of the drill sergeant school at Fort Jackson, S.C.
Once treated as an equal to brigade commanders, Sergeant Major King was no longer invited to meetings regarding the school. In his first visit, General Longo told her, “I’ve been hearing bad things about you,” she said. In a subsequent visit, he had an aide tell her to avoid the cafeteria while the general dined there.
In a visit last September, Sergeant Major Calpena delivered a blistering critique of Sergeant Major King’s tenure, she said, telling the staff she had been overly doctrinaire and by-the-book.
She said she once even overheard Sergeant Major Calpena urging a disgruntled sergeant to file a complaint against her. “I was working 16-, 18-hour days, and Sergeant Major Calpena was running around, trying to get me relieved, sabotaging me,” she said.
Sergeant Major Calpena, an Army Ranger with multiple combat deployments, announced her suspension last November in a stormy private meeting in her office. “He came in swinging,” she said, telling her she was deeply unpopular among her peers because of her unyielding style and lack of front-line experience.
Cut off from her friends and students, she said, the holiday season was almost unbearable. “If I had just quit, I knew that I could possibly die. Because those were very dark days,” she said. “The drill sergeant school was all I had.”
Sergeant Major Maggard’s wife, Barbara, would call just to hear her voice, then hang up when she answered, not speaking because of the no-contact order. On Christmas, she left presents on Sergeant Major King’s porch.
In March, General Longo’s office sent a redacted version of its investigation, which contained complaints from eight sergeants, all of whom had faced disciplinary action, according to her lawyer, James E. Smith, a state legislator and member of the Army National Guard. Two later rescinded their complaints, he said.
“If she had been a man, this would not have happened,” he said, noting that several recent male commandants have not had combat experience but did not face such complaints.
Sergeant Major King gathered support statements from more than 45 soldiers, but no action was taken on her response until she filed the complaint.
She is now asking to remain commandant for six additional months — the period she was under suspension. She also wants to stay in the Army beyond her mandatory retirement date in August.
Her command has said she will be replaced on schedule, May 17. But she has implored South Carolina’s Congressional delegation to intervene.
“If I leave next week, where do I go?” she asked. “I had a family in the Army.”
By James Dao
May 11, 2012
New York Times l Once Hailed as Army Pioneer, Now Battling to Stay on the Job
SanDiego Source l Navy SEALs pave way for the future
April 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
About five years ago, the Coronado-based Naval Special Warfare Command was having a tough time recruiting men to become Navy SEALs.
To capture that key 18- to 24-year-old male market, production company Bandito Brothers was hired to use flashy cinematography to document Navy SEAL training.
Impressed by the action shots, Bandito Brothers turned the footage and concept into a screenplay.
“Act of Valor,” which took five years to produce, hit theaters in February and helped popularize the SEALs. That Hollywood buzz, paired with a down economy and a high unemployment rate, caused more men to sign up.
The command includes 9,000 active duty, civilians and subject matter experts. Some 2,000 are enlisted Navy SEALs, 550 are Naval SEAL officers and 750 are combatant-craft crewmen.
“For every kid who steps in the door, five get turned away,” said Rear Adm. Garry Bonelli, deputy commander for Naval Special Warfare Command, who spoke at the University Club’s monthly military happy hour on Monday.
A post-9/11 world has dramatically changed the size and scope of the force.
“We’ve doubled in size and tripled in budget,” he said. “The hard part is we’ve quadrupled in missions.”
Navy SEALs are gone 255 days out of the year, out in the fight or training.
“We are not putting heads in beds at home with their wives and families,” he said. “That’s probably one of the biggest dynamics that’s changed.”
When Bonelli enlisted in the Navy in 1968, he was surrounded by other single guys. Today however, half are married, and of that half, most have children. The government is reacting to that paradigm shift, he said.
“The DoD is finally putting money where their mouth is and trying to help families, too,” he said. “With resilient warrior families, I can get resilient warriors.”
Surprisingly, the types of warriors that make great SEALs aren’t usually Division 1 football players or wrestlers, he said (though some SEALs are former gold and silver Olympians).
“They are more like Rudy,” he said, referring to Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger in the film that depicts the life of a young man who dreamed of playing college football despite significant obstacles. “The guy who gets knocked down and gets back up and contributes to the team.”
That team ability means being able to both lead and follow.
“The biggest bad asses I know are the most humble people in the world,” Bonelli said. “You’d never know.”
The strenuous psychological and physical process knocks down plenty of applicants, revealing those desirable Rudy gems early on. Lots of attrition occurs during the infamous “hell week,” when trainees are kept awake for long periods of time.
Out of the 5,000 applicants a year, 1,000 are accepted into the program.
“Out of that we are lucky to graduate 250,” he said. “We’ve spent a lot of your tax dollars figuring out who can become a Navy SEAL.”
The selection and training process takes a lengthy two and a half years before a SEAL can be placed overseas.
“Our Achilles heel right now is diversity. Most of the guys look like Southern Californian surfers,” he said. “Most of them are white, well-tanned and good looking guys.”
And that’s whether they come from Oshkosh, Wisc., New York City or Southern California, he said.
“What I need is diversity. When I am putting people in the world, I need people of color, people who have diverse backgrounds,” he said.
The ideal diverse candidate has lived somewhere other than the United States and can speak second and third languages, like French or Spanish. Today, knowing Middle Eastern languages is especially helpful when being stationed overseas.
“They are difficult to recruit and we are having a heck of a time doing that,” he said.
The U.S. Naval Academy is doing a good job of diversifying its student body, Bonelli said. Many of its graduates breeze through the SEAL’s strenuous training program and become officers.
“People can identify with those young leaders,” he said. “That is how we hope to diversify the force, but it’s a long-term investment.”
A SEAL’s talents don’t just include putting bullets on a target; being a diplomat and problem-solver is also essential in order to help foreign nations fight their own fight and secure their own country.
The preponderance of Bonelli’s Navy SEAL force is in Afghanistan, but they are also in about two dozen other countries at the moment.
They’re at some locations because they’ve been invited; other places absolutely don’t want them there but they are there anyways, he noted.
“Some places we are there and they don’t know we are there, and other places they think we are there but we’ve never been there,” he said.
By Tierney Plumb
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Wash Post Opinion l College Diversity At Risk
January 16, 2012 § Leave a comment
There have been few moments in our history when the nation so badly needed institutions to unify the country, overcome divisiveness, and dispel the unfounded “jealousies and prejudices” that our first president warned against. As George Washington wrote to Alexander Hamilton, bringing together the youth “from different parts of the United States” at a university would allow young people to learn there was no basis for “jealousies and prejudices which one part of the union had imbibed against another part.”
Yet if the Supreme Court decides to hear a case called Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin , colleges could be severely restricted in continuing to serve this unifying function.
A white student named Abigail Fisher has argued that she would have been admitted to the University of Texas if the school had refrained from considering race in its admissions decisions and that her constitutional rights have been harmed as a result. Lower courts decided against Fisher, ruling that the university’s efforts to assemble a racially diverse student body complied with the constitutional standards established in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger , the Supreme Court’s definitive holding on affirmative action in U.S. education.
A move away from the court’s recognition in Grutter of the “substantial” and “laudable” benefits of a diverse student body would be as damaging to higher education as it would be ill-timed for the nation at large. When students encounter others’ points of view and discover how contrary opinions have been forged by different life experiences, they learn more than how we differ: They learn what we have in common.
The places in U.S. society where people of different backgrounds have a meaningful opportunity to learn about each other are far too rare. Yet instead of cultivating these unifying social institutions, we have been undermining them. Sixteen years ago, California adopted a ballot measure banning the consideration of race in admissions decisions. Within five years, only 3 percent of the students in California’s public law schools were African American (compared with 10 percent at the state’s private law schools), and black enrollment declined throughout the state system. Similar ballot measures have passed in Arizona, Washington state and Michigan, where a federal appellate court is reviewing the law’s constitutionality. This year, New Hampshire banned admissions policies that value racial diversity.
Especially in this era of economic insecurity, the argument is made that diversity in post-secondary schools should be focused on family income rather than racial diversity. Of course, we want both. When universities are granted the freedom to assemble student bodies featuring multiple types of diversity and possess the resources to support “need blind” admissions with full financial aid, the result is a highly sought-after learning environment that attracts the best students.
Consider Columbia, where our undergraduate student body has the highest percentage of low- and moderate-income students and the largest number of military veterans of our peer institutions, as well as the highest percentage of African American students among the nation’s top 30 universities. But our country cannot rely on private universities such as Columbia to realize these benefits. Far more students attend our great public universities, where a combination of declining state support and unfavorable ballot measures pose a serious risk to our model of higher education.
Dismantling an educational system that for decades has valued contact among students with different sensibilities and replacing it with one that does not would be regrettable on many fronts. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger that the benefits of a diverse student body are “not theoretical but real”: Indeed, more than five dozen leading corporations, including Microsoft, General Electric, Shell Oil and 3M, told the court in 2003 that students learning in diverse educational settings can be expected to be better workers. These companies cited skills ranging from creative problem solving and the ability to develop products with cross-cultural appeal to the employees’ ease with global business partners and their positive effect on the work environment. In an amicus brief submitted to the court, retired U.S. military leaders also advocated racially diverse student bodies, noting that with minorities constituting 40 percent of the active-duty armed forces as of 2002, “success with the challenges of diversity is critical to national security.”
Last month, the departments of Education and Justice announced new guidance on the implementation of Grutter intended to encourage schools embracing the educational benefits of a diverse student body. The action is a strong antidote to what had been a prevailing vagueness in legal guidance and its attendant chilling effect on university presidents and admissions officers. But the impact could be short-lived, for it will remain relevant only so long as the rationale for considering race in admissions remains constitutionally valid.
This is the wrong time for the Supreme Court to abandon its decades-old commitment to the role colleges and universities play in unifying and elevating U.S. society. To ensure the nation’s prosperity and fulfill our founding ideals of equal opportunity, the court should stand by its strong endorsement of diversity in higher education.
By Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University and a director of The Washington Post Co. He was the named defendant in the 2003 cases Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger.
January 15, 2012
Chron l USDA says it's striving to become more diverse
November 1, 2011 § Leave a comment
USDA says it’s striving to become more diverse
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is serious about becoming a more culturally diverse workplace but will need time to transform itself into the fully representative agency it strives to be, the department’s only minority undersecretary said last week.
The department, which admits to having a checkered past regarding civil rights issues, has not attained the racial breakdown in staffing it hopes to accomplish but is working hard to get there, said USDA Undersecretary Edward Avalos.
“It’s not going to happen overnight,” Avalos said about the department’s cultural transformation initiative. “But we’re turning that ship in the right direction.”
Avalos, who oversees the department’s marketing and regulatory programs, was among the speakers at a two-day conference last week in San Antonio examining ways of attracting more Hispanics into the field of agriculture.
He said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had initiated the workplace diversity program to make sure the department had the capabilities demanded by of an increasingly diverse agricultural community.
He has urged recruiters in the agencies he’s responsible for to make extra efforts to find the most talented Hispanic and minority job candidates for agency openings. Avalos does not endorse hiring quotas but has increased recruitment of minority interns, has made diversity training mandatory for employees and has encouraged supervisors to set up mentoring programs and to promote top performing minority employees.
“The process of change at the USDA is working,” he said.
Avalos does not oversee the agency that provides farm loans and other assistance that has been at the center of discrimination claims by black, Hispanic and Native American farmers. He acknowledged, however, that those complaints left scars and said that the department is taking steps to make sure discriminatory practices do no arise again.
Edward Romero, founder of one of the conference’s organizers, AgForLife, said Hispanic recruitment should improve once young people learn that there are a vast array of jobs in agriculture beyond those in the field or in livestock pens.
William Pack
October 30, 2011
The Indianapolis Star l Congress recognizes first black Marines
October 29, 2011 § Leave a comment
Congress recognizes first black Marines
Congress voted Tuesday to grant the first black fighters of the last military branch to accept them, the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
The 422-0 vote honors about 20,000 Montford Point Marines, who trained in a separate facility called Montford Point that operated at Camp Lejeune, N.C., from 1942 to 1949 when all military branches were segregated.
“This has been a real long time coming,” said Johnny C. Washington, 82. “It seems like everything we did for a long time was hidden. It’s been real frustrating when you see others get recognition and not us.”
While the African-American Army Buffalo Soldiers and the Air Force Tuskegee Airmen have had some measure of renown, the first black Marines have grown old mostly in obscurity.
The Army and Navy had been recruiting blacks since the Civil War. But even when they did join, the Montford Point Marines never achieved officer status and were assigned mostly to ammunition and supply duty.
Some fought at Iwo Jima and went to Japan to clean up the ash after the atomic bomb was dropped over Nagasaki.
Averitte Corley, 84, and Washington said basic training was brutal, their barracks were in ramshackle huts, and the Marines often were kicked and slapped during drills.
“They tried to make us better Marines,” Washington said.
Some didn’t make it through, Corley said.
“We were the first blacks, and they wanted to make sure you measured up,” said Corley, whose platoon included former New York City Mayor David Dinkins.
Segregation reigned in the South of the 1940s, and life on base wasn’t much better.
“We’d go to Camp Lejeune for dental appointments, and 20 of us would have to wait in the back of a covered truck while one Marine at a time went in for his appointment,” Washington said. “When he was done, another guy would go in. It was hot waiting in the truck. It would take hours.”
Corley, who now lives in Indianapolis, said that in talking to white Marines years later, he realized that all Marine drills were torturous.
“Boot camp is boot camp,” he said.
Corley’s duties in the Marines included guarding Japanese prisoners of war in Saipan and guarding naval installations in Norfolk, Va.
Washington said he joined at 17 when he lived in Mississippi because “I’d seen some pictures, and I liked the uniforms.”
He stayed in the Marines for 30 years, achieving the rank of sergeant major and serving in three wars: World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Washington was an infantry squad leader in Korea and a first sergeant in a 13-month tour of Vietnam, leading combat patrols in both wars. He now lives in Indianapolis.
Next year, the Marine Corps plans to teach all Marines about Montford Point. Commandant Gen. Jim Amos — the first Marine aviator named to the Corps’ top job — has made diversifying the staunchly traditional branch a top priority.
Corley said a little refresher course would be good for all Marines.
“A lot of these young guys don’t know the history of the Marine Corps,” Corley said. “They think blacks have always been there, and that wasn’t the case. There was a lot of discrimination. But I think a majority of the guys who commanded us want to see some progress.”
By John Tuohy
Tuesday Oct 25, 2011
The Indianapolis Star l Congress recognizes first black Marines
USA Today l Number of female Fortune 500 CEOs at record high
October 26, 2011 § Leave a comment
A new record has been set for female leadership: More women are slated to take the reins of Fortune 500 companies than ever before.
On Tuesday, IBM tapped Virginia “Ginni” Rometty to succeed Sam Palmisano, making her the first female CEO in the company’s 100-year history. Today pharmaceutical firm Mylan said Heather Bresch will succeed Robert Coury as CEO. Both appointments become effective Jan. 1.
If no female steps down before the start of the new year, there will be 18 women running Fortune 500 companies in 2012. Previously, there haven’t been more than 16 females running Fortune 500 firms at the same time.
Yet, while upcoming ascensions are notable, the gender gap between men and women in the workplace remains vast, with females struggling to get the mentors they need and the pay to equal their male counterparts.
“The advancement of key women in business is stalled,” says Cynthia Good, CEO of women’s business newsletter Little PINK Book.
Currently, female leaders make up about 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs — that’s barely up from the 2% just seven years ago, says Good.
In 2009, women held 15.2% of Fortune 500 board seats, according to women’s issues research group Catalyst. In both 2009 and 2010, 12% of Fortune 500 companies had no women serving on their boards.
“We’ve really flat-lined,” says Debbie Soon, Catalyst senior vice president of marketing and strategy. “For the last five years there’s been hardly any progress.”
Yet, there is hope that as more women take the top ranks, female workers will be provided with more role models they can emulate.
“It sends the message of ‘yes, women can do this,'” Good says. “Women need to see other women in key roles.”
In the last few months alone, three other new female CEOs have emerged: Margaret Whitman became Hewlett-Packard CEO in September, Denise Morrison took the CEO post at Campbell Soup Company in August and Gracia Martore was named CEO of Gannett earlier this month (Gannett owns USA TODAY.)
And there have been some reduced ranks as well. For instance, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz was fired in September.
But Good says that the numbers just aren’t strong enough.
“Facts are facts,” she says. “And 3% is just 3%.”
So what’s holding women back? A variety of issues, say experts.
Men, who tend to tout their accomplishments more than women, are promoted and hired based on potential, Good says. Women, who can be more reticent, “are promoted and hired based on if they can do the job.”
Anecdotally speaking, men are also more apt to quickly say “yes” to a career-enhancing assignment that could affect their personal life, while women more tend to think about the opportunity and consider how it could affect home situations such as eldercare or childcare, says Catalyst’s Soon.
In turn, the next time a manager has a job to offer, he or she may remember that female’s hesitation and consider going with another candidate, she says.
Even newly tapped IBM CEO Rometty says that she had to change her thinking process — and work style — in order to move up the corporate ranks.
Speaking at a recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, she recounted a story from “early, early” in her career: She was offered a “big job” that she didn’t think she was prepared to take. She told the person who made the offer that she didn’t have experience, and that she had to think about the offer before giving an answer.
When she told her husband about that discussion, Rometty said his response was: “Do you think a man would have ever answered the question that way?”
That was a wake-up call that she needed to be more self-assured, as well as have the courage to take professional leaps. “You have to be very confident, even though you are so self-critical inside,” she said.
Good says that it’s not only important for women to make changes in their behavior — but that companies need to make some shifts as well.
“We’ve got to get past the point of just encouragement, suggestions and lip service about promoting women,” she says. “We’ve got to get to the point where we set up metrics and very specific achievable goals where it leads to change.”
Change won’t come “from one new women CEO here and one there,” Good says. It’ll only come when businesses measure and benchmark their progress.
Both Good and Catalyst’s Soon point out some extra incentive for companies to push forward on diversity efforts: firms with more female managers tend to be more profitable.
There was a 16.7% return on equity for companies that have at least three women board members according to a 2007 Catalyst report. The average for all companies analyzed was 11.5%.
“When you have diversity of thought and various perspectives, you benefit from being able to talk about things that you wouldn’t have even considering if you have a very homogeneous management team,” says Good.
By Laura Petrecca, USA TODAY
USA Today l Number of female Fortune 500 CEOs at record high
Diversity Registry l Top Diversity Leaders
October 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
The Diversity Registry has a “List of 500” leaders in diversity. Of leaders from companies across all industries, we were happy to see some defense and aerospace industry members mentioned.
#28 The Boeing Company
Ms. Joyce E. Tucker
Global Diversity & Employee Rights
Learn more
#95 Raytheon Company
Mr. Hayward L. Bell
Chief Diversity Officer
Learn more
Congratulations Ms. Tucker and Mr. Bell!
About the Diversity Registry
The Diversity Registry is an online reference to employers who are committed to diversity. Its mission is to showcase the diversity initiatives of major employers, and to help job seekers, researchers and others to determine the extent to which employers promote diversity within and outside of their organizations.
Defense & Aerospace News 