The Justice Department agreed to a $22.6 million settlement for 34 women who sued the F.B.I., accusing the bureau of unfairly dismissing them from its agent training program because of their gender, according to court documents.
As part of the proposed settlement, the women can reapply to become agents and two outside experts will review the training program to make sure the evaluation process is fair.
“It was a long time coming,” said Paula Bird, 36, who was one of the women who filed the complaint in 2019. “They finally acknowledged there were problems, and they will hopefully do something about.”
The settlement still has to be approved by Judge Jia M. Cobb of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia.
The women, former recruits, filed the lawsuit, saying the F.B.I. had discriminated against them because of their gender and accusing the bureau of employing a double standard.
All the women had passed their fitness, academic and firearms tests at the F.B.I.’s facility in Quantico, Va. But they failed the last phase known as tactical training, which involves entering a house and confronting an armed attacker. The tactical training takes place at Hogan’s Alley, the F.B.I.’s mock town where hired actors portray terrorists and criminals.
The women accused instructors of treating women differently and running a “good-old-boy network” at the training academy.
“When male trainees do the same, they are praised for having a ‘command presence,’” the lawsuit said.
The women were dismissed from new-agent training between April 2015 and August 2024.
The complaints eventually prompted a review by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
In a report released in December 2022, the inspector general found that female trainees received a “disproportionate number of performance citations and were dismissed at rates higher than expected based on their share of the population.”
Women had been “substantially underrepresented as tactical and defensive tactics instructors,” the report added, noting that instructors told “sexist stories or jokes.”
According to the lawsuit, male instructors exposed the women to a hostile work environment, sexual harassment and inappropriate jokes. One woman said that an instructor referred to an African American female trainee as “spaghetti head,” a reference to her braids. The woman also said training agents made repeated sexual advances.
After the report was published, the lawyers for the women reached out to discuss a settlement but the Justice Department did not budge. Then in early 2024, the department approached the lawyers about one, according to court documents.
The F.B.I. made changes based on the inspector general’s recommendations, but the lawyers for the women who sued said it was not enough. The proposed settlement is meant to help overhaul the F.B.I.’s policies and practices for evaluating agent trainees.
Two psychologists will conduct the review of the program, trying to root out bias and increase the objectivity of evaluations.
In a statement on Monday, the bureau declined to comment on the settlement, saying that it had “taken significant steps over the past five years to further ensure gender equity in the training and development of all our trainees.”
“The F.B.I. would have been a much better agency if they had all of these women among their agents,” said Christine E. Webber, one of the lawyers who worked on the case.
“They showed they had what it takes to pass every objective test,” Ms. Webber said. “It was the one subjective test that led to their dismissal.”
The women will get their chance if they want it. And if they graduate from their training, they will be placed in one of their top three choices of field office, along with receiving a salary that reflects when they would have graduated with their original class.
It is unclear how many of the women will reapply. Ms. Bird said too much time had passed and she had moved on with her life. “I don’t have the same passion to join the bureau again,” she added.
Even as it has prioritized recruiting more women, the F.B.I. has struggled to add more female agents at the bureau, a historically male-dominated law enforcement agency. As of April, women composed about a fourth of the bureau’s 13,600 agents.
But about 46 percent of the F.B.I.’s approximate 37,000 employees are women. It is not clear how many female agents are in senior positions making operational decisions.
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