... How diverse is President Joe Biden's cabinet?
For more than 25 years, in three editions of Diversity in the Power Elite (1998, 2006, 2018), Bill Domhoff and I have been tracking diversity in the corporate, political, and military elites. This has included systematic looks at the extent to which presidential cabinets have changed, from the all-white and almost all-male cabinets of most of the first 75 years of the twentieth century, to the cabinets of the last 45 years -- which have included more women, some Blacks, some Latinx, and some Asian Americans.
Trump's cabinet was the least diverse in thirty years.
The 15 men and women in Biden's initial cabinet are much more diverse, of course, than the 21 men and three women Trump appointed to his cabinet during his four years in office. But how does Biden's cabinet compare to previous cabinets?
Note that cabinet positions have changed over time.
I have used the ones that were designated officially as cabinet positions when each President was in office. The current 15 cabinet positions are: Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services (HHS), Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. I have not included the various cabinet-level positions (such as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of Management and Budget (OMB) or the representative to the United Nations), even though some Presidents have included them in cabinet meetings, and over the years some people have lobbied for certain of these to be designated as full cabinet positions. When relevant, however, I have mentioned appointments to cabinet-level positions. ...
