Diversity in U.S. Governments 1901-2021

This letter aims to measure the degree of marginalization of minority groups (women, Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other races) in U.S. government administrations from 1901 to 2021. First, I assigned influence values to the government positions based on their relative importance. Then I determined the government officials, which belonged to minority groups. Based on this data a relative influence value for each minority group was calculated for each U.S. administration, which again was divided by the percentage of this subgroup in the total U.S. population in order to gain a measurement of over- and underrepresentation. The result of this study is that not all minorities were marginalized throughout the whole period and that the most underrepresented group in U.S. government administrations were women.