Justice Department Settles Sex Discrimination Lawsuit Against City of Corpus Christi, Texas, Police Department

The Department of Justice announced today that it has entered into a settlement to resolve the department’s allegations that the city of Corpus Christi, Texas, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against women when hiring entry-level police officers.

 The United States’ complaint against Corpus Christi, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, alleges that between 2005 and 2011, the city used a physical abilities test when hiring entry-level police officers, and that test screened out many more women than men but did not test for what is required on the job.   Title VII prohibits discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin or religion, whether the discrimination is intentional or involves the use of employment practices, like physical abilities tests, that have a disparate impact and are not job related and consistent with business necessity.  

  “Hiring processes, including for those who seek to serve and protect the public as police officers, should be free from discrimination,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division.   “ The department commends Corpus Christi for its cooperation, for working to put in place new hiring procedures that comply with Title VII, and for providing relief to the women who have been harmed by the prior practices challenged by the department.”

 The Justice Department and Corpus Christi jointly filed a motion today requesting that the court provisionally enter a consent decree that lays out the terms of the settlement.   The motion also asks the court to schedule a fairness hearing on the decree, the opportunity provided by Title VII for the public to comment on the decree.   The proposed consent decree must be approved by the court.

 The consent decree requires that Corpus Christi no longer use the physical abilities test challenged by the United States for selecting entry-level police officers.   It also requires the city to develop a new selection procedure that complies with Title VII.   Additionally, the consent decree requires the city to pay $700,000 as backpay to female applicants who took and failed the challenged physical abilities test between 2005 and 2011 and are determined to be eligible for relief.  Also under the consent decree, some women who took and failed the challenged physical abilities test between 2005 and 2011 may receive offers of priority employment with retroactive seniority and benefits. Applicants interested in priority employment must pass the new, lawful selection procedure developed by Corpus Christi under the decree and meet other qualifications required of all applicants considered for entry-level police officer positions.    

“The physical abilities test formerly used by Corpus Christi prevented the city from distinguishing between qualified and unqualified applicants,” continued Mr. Perez.   “Here, the Justice Department is ensuring the selection of qualified officers while eliminating artificial, discriminatory barriers.   Because Corpus Christi will develop a new, lawful test that all candidates must pass, the public will be assured that the selection process is fair and nondiscriminatory and selects qualified candidates.”

 Enforcement of federal employment discrimination laws is a top priority for the Justice Department.   Additional information about Title VII and other federal employment laws is available on the Civil Rights Division’s website at www.justice.gov/crt .

Celebrating Women Special Agents, part 5

A Diversity of Backgrounds and Experiences

In the 40 years since the FBI began training women to be special agents, many have said it was a dream they had held since childhood. They played cops and robbers as kids, kept their noses clean, and maybe joined the military or the local police, consciously burnishing their credentials on the road to becoming G-women.

“I’m not quite sure where the seed got planted,” said Katrina G., an agent who now runs the Bureau’s Forensic Audio Video and Image Analysis Unit. “But I thought the FBI—fidelity, bravery, integrity—you can’t go wrong. I always wanted to be someone to do the right thing, to be fair and honest, and to stick up for the little guys.”

Others followed a less scripted route. Shelia T., an agent at the FBI’s Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, set out in college to be a research professor and was well on her way when she drove a friend to an FBI recruitment event on campus. “We went in and sat through the session,” she recalled. “My friend is listening because she’s interested and I’m in the back waiting for her to finish so we can go study.” An agent suggested Shelia apply, too. She found herself at the FBI Academy for new-agent training on August 16, 1998. A few years later she was in Ken Lay’s office at Enron, collecting evidence at the center of the Bureau’s largest-ever white-collar crime scene.

Their stories, revealed in more than a dozen interviews with female agents past and present, show there’s no well-defined template for women agents, apart from a desire to serve. Like the first two women agents—a nun and a Marine—they arrived at the FBI with varied backgrounds and proceeded to have similarly varied careers. In video interviews, they talk about what brought them to the Bureau, the challenges they faced, their unique work experiences, and their reflections on careers that broke more than a few glass ceilings.

A common thread is that none aspired to be great women agents, just great agents that happened to be women.

Here’s a preview:

■A 24-year agent who early in her career competed for a spot on the Hostage Rescue Team: “I was driven by the challenge. It didn’t even occur to me that I was a female and that I was being questioned because I was a female.”

■A retired agent who rose through a series of leadership firsts to the Bureau’s third-highest position: “At the time women became the first at anything somebody always took notice. And often it was the women who took notice because we were trying to find our way and make sure that we had the opportunities that men who were agents had. And we did.”

■Special agent in charge of the Anchorage Division: “I think women coming through today, they benefit from the experiences of all the women that have gone before, and the fact that it’s not considered so unusual now.”

The growing ranks of women agents echo the Anchorage agent’s comments—more than 2,600 today, including 11 in charge of field offices. “As a whole, the Bureau is better for having women agents,” she said. “I think we make the Bureau more complete.”

FBI Top Stories: Celebrating Women Special Agents, part 4

Who Said It? Pop Culture’s Take on Women Special Agents

1. “I am in a dress, I have gel in my hair, I haven’t slept all night, I’m starved, and I’m armed! Don’t mess with me!”

2. “You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you—why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you’re afraid to.”

3. “He was kinda of cute...for a sociopath.”

4. “Hey, you think it’s easy being surrounded by guys with guns all day?”

Male agent: “I thought you liked guys with guns.”

“I like the guns.”

5. “What are you doing here?”

Male scientist: “We’re trying to plug a hole in the universe. What are you doing here?”

“Apparently the same thing.”

6. “Sometimes looking for extreme possibilities makes you blind to the probable explanation right in front of you.”

7. “Journalist William D. Tammeus wrote: You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back.”

8. “A cup of tea, a German-English dictionary, and I’ll have it translated in a day or two.”

It took a while for Hollywood and television to notice that FBI women special agents had come on the scene in 1972—and to think how they might work into old and new storylines. At first, in the early 1990s, the focus was on training and new agents…and on comedy—women trying by hook or by crook to make it in a man’s profession. Now you find our women agents portrayed in a variety of decisive roles in team environments—trying to locate missing persons, analyzing evidence, analyzing the criminal mind, and, of course, investigating paranormal activity and worldwide conspiracies. We think it’s just a matter of time before women agents are cast as the operational leaders they are in real life.

Key to the Quiz

1. “I am in a dress, I have gel in my hair, I haven’t slept all night, I’m starved, and I’m armed! Don’t mess with me!”

Special Agent Gracie Hart (Sandra Bullock) is an FBI agent in Miss Congeniality (2000) who isn’t entirely happy about going undercover in the Miss United States beauty pageant to prevent a group from bombing the event.

2. “You see a lot, doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you—why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you’re afraid to.”

Special Agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), fresh out of new agent training, verbally spars with the perfidious Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs.

3. “He was kinda of cute...for a sociopath.”

New Agent Janis Zuckerman (Mary Gross) teams with Ellie DeWitt (Rebecca De Mornay) in FEDS (1988) to try to get through the hazing and hazards of FBI new agent training.

4. “Hey, you think it’s easy being surrounded by guys with guns all day?”

Male agent: “I thought you liked guys with guns.”

“I like the guns.”

Special Agent Samantha “Sam” Spade (Poppy Montgomery) works on a fictional Missing Persons Squad in New York City in the television series Without a Trace, which ran from 2002 to 2009.

5. “What are you doing here?”

Male scientist: “We’re trying to plug a hole in the universe. What are you doing here?”

“Apparently the same thing.”

In a series with parallel universes, Special Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) is part of a multi-agency task force investigating strange crimes with the help of an institutionalized scientist in Fringe: There’s More Than One of Everything (2009).

6. “Sometimes looking for extreme possibilities makes you blind to the probable explanation right in front of you.”

Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) waxes philosophical with her partner Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) in the television science fiction drama X-Files, which ran from 1993 to 2002.

7. “Journalist William D. Tammeus wrote: You don’t really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around and why his parents will always wave back.”

In Criminal Minds: Cradle to Grave (2009), Special Agent Jennifer “JJ” Jareau gives her signature voiceover to an episode featuring the fictional casework of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.

8. “A cup of tea, a German-English dictionary, and I’ll have it translated in a day or two.”

Special Agent Diana Barrigan (Marsha Thomason) sets Peter Burke straight in the “Deadline” episode of White Collar (2009).

FBI Top Stories: Celebrating Women Special Agents part 2

Women Blaze a Trail in 1972

Top right- Malone, bottom right- Misko

They were known as the nun and the Marine. The respective backgrounds of Joanne Pierce Misko and Susan Roley Malone could not have been more dissimilar. But 40 years ago, on July 17, 1972, the two women were drawn together by a shared goal—to become FBI special agents.

Up until then, under the leadership of longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, only men could be agents. But just weeks after Hoover died in May 1972, the Bureau’s acting director—motivated in part by new equal rights laws—changed the men-only policy that had been in place since the Prohibition Era. So on a balmy Monday exactly four decades ago, the two women assembled with 43 similarly pressed and starched men at FBI Headquarters to take their oath before heading down to the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia for 14 weeks (now 20) of physical and mental conditioning.

The new agent training was tough enough on its own—firearms, strength, endurance, self-defense, academics. But for Misko and Malone, who were expected to meet the requirements long in place for males, there was the added dimension of their novelty, which was not universally embraced at first.

“I’m sure when they first saw that there were two women in their class it was like, ‘Oh, we got them,’” Misko recalled in a recent interview. Malone, who had already broken some stereotypes as a Marine, remembers a fellow classmate confronting her during a break, brusquely asking why she thought she could be an FBI agent. “And I sat down and I talked to him,” Malone stated. “I said, ‘I love my country just like you do. I want to be here for the same reasons that you want to be here.’” He heard her out. And in the weeks that followed, the two women set out to demonstrate that they belonged in their coveted slots in New Agent Class 73-1. They won over some of the most ardent doubters by rising to every challenge and helping their classmates over some hurdles along the way. In the crucible of training, the group bonded quickly.

“We got along pretty well and everybody kind of pulled together as a class,” said Misko, who was 31 at the time. “Because in training I think we were all in the same boat. We were all trying to prove ourselves.”

Permitting women into the ranks of special agents was a big story at the time, but the Bureau tried to minimize distractions in order to maintain the integrity of training. “They wanted us to be like any other agent,” said Malone, who was 25 when she entered the FBI Academy. “They didn’t want to make this inordinately special or set us apart from our fellow agents. I think that was very important at the time. We wanted to be just another agent.”

Despite following wildly divergent paths to Quantico and having very little in common, Misko and Malone—the nun and the Marine—leaned on each other to get through training. “We supported each other,” said Malone. “We were complementary. We worked together. We would practice the run at night, we would go to the gym and work out. We were allies. There’s that bond there when you’re someone’s roommate and you’re going through the same training. That’s a lifelong bond.”

Misko and Malone completed the training in October 1972 and, like all new agents, received orders to report to one of the Bureau’s field offices. Malone was sent to Omaha and Misko to St. Louis. Both women recall being met with some initial resistance in the ranks, but quickly showed they could pull their weight. The former roommates would cross paths occasionally in their successful careers. They recognize today they were trailblazers, but that was never their goal.

“I honestly didn’t see myself as a pioneer,” said Misko, now 71. “It was just a role that I was fortunate enough to become a part of.”

Malone, 65, echoed Misko’s comments. “I was an agent first and Joanne was an agent first. We wanted to be agents first. We just happened to be women.”

Firsts in Their Field

On July 17, 1972, the first two women of the modern era entered the FBI Training Academy at Quantico, Virginia.

This is the second story in our series marking the 40-year anniversary of women special agents.

Joanne Pierce Misko

Joanne Pierce Misko was a nun in New York for 10 years before joining the FBI in 1970 as a researcher. When the opportunity arose in 1972 to become one of the first women special agents, her boss at the time explained all the pluses and minuses. “Okay,” she said. “I still want to do it.”

Susan Roley Malone

Susan Roley Malone was in the Marine Corps when the FBI opened new-agent training to women. She always admired the Bureau—she spent a year researching the FBI for an eighth-grade project. When women were allowed into the Academy, she said, “I was encouraged by my friends and my own desires, and I applied.”