While recently portrayed as a bastion of progressive attitudes, the Central Intelligence Agency has a history of racial and gender disparity. As late as 1991, women were second class employees who were kept in the lower ranks, with men overwhelmingly occupying senior positions and leadership roles. A series of declassified memos help explain this disparity, showing CIA’s decades old resistance to putting women in charge of anything - even ensuring equal employment practices.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA had an extremely low number of Hispanic employees, which, given the agency’s extensive involvement in Latin and Caribbean nations might come as a surprise. As a solution to the Agency’s disproportionate representation of the nation’s second largest minority, the agency hired a Hispanic Program Coordinator (HPC). Less than four years later, the unnamed and unthanked program coordinator resigned, having increased the Agency’s Hispanic employee population to an entire one percent.