Yes We Can: Obama’s Election and the Sense of Inclusion and Job Satisfaction among Minority Federal Workers

ABSTRACT

The election of President Obama, the first African American president of the United States, was an historic and symbolically important event that may have influenced the workplace attitudes of minority federal workers, although this question has yet to be tested empirically. Using difference-in-differences analyses of data from the 2008 and 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys, this study explores the influence of Obama’s election on minority employees’ sense of inclusion and job satisfaction in the Department of Education (DoEd) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the two federal agencies with the largest proportion of African American employees. The findings suggest that minority employees in the DoEd and HUD experienced a net increase in their sense of inclusion and job satisfaction after the presidential election. The effect size is small, however, and we found little evidence of an Obama effect across other federal agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusion
• job satisfaction
• diversity
• leadership

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/arrest_conviction.cfm (accessed September 16, 2017)

2. We also tested the idea of excluding the pay satisfaction item from the standard Global Satisfaction Index. The regression results were substantially the same. Because this index is well established and published as part of the annual FEVS report, we believe it is best to stick with the standard measurement for the Global Satisfaction Index.

3. The study’s initial models included the control variable of gender. However, in 2008, 140,793 (66.34%) respondents provided “No Basis to Judge” or “Do Not Know” responses to gender, for reasons we could not determine. Because 66.34% is such a large percentage of missing data, the gender variable was excluded from the final model.