The Justice Department agreed to a $22.6 million settlement for 34 women who sued the FBI, accusing the bureau of unfairly dismissing them from its agent training program because of their gender. 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, the New York Times reports. “It was a long time coming,” said Paula Bird, 36, one of the women who filed the complaint in 2019. “They finally acknowledged there were problems, and they will hopefully do something about.” The women said the FBI 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 FBI facility in Quantico, Va. 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, a 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 DOJ inspector general said 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.” The IG said instructors told “sexist stories or jokes.” Even as it has prioritized recruiting more women, the historically male-dominated FBI has struggled to add more female agents. Zs of April, women composed about a fourth of the bureau’s 13,600 agents.