Arms Firms Lag in Diversity at Top, Study Says : Defense: Women hold fewer than 6% of the highest posts and minorities fewer than 2%, the report concludes.

Women held fewer than 6% of directorships and upper management jobs at the nation’s top 20 defense contractors in 1990 and minorities fewer than 2% of the posts, only a slight improvement for both groups over 10 years ago, according to a study by the Center for Public Integrity released Thursday.

In singling out the defense industry for scrutiny, the nonprofit organization cited a 1965 executive order by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson requiring equal opportunity in hiring and promotion for all companies doing business with the federal government.

“Women and minorities can die or be taken prisoner by the enemy in a war, but they apparently cannot be trusted with top managerial responsibilities at America’s leading defense contractors,” said Charles Lewis, executive director of the center, an organization that encourages investigative reporting.

“With women making up more than 45% of the national work force, these numbers are stark indicators of the inequalities in these high-technology industries,” the study said.

In the study of the 20 largest defense contractors, based on dollar amounts of contracts in 1989, the number of women in board of director and vice president posts or above increased slightly more than 2% over the 1980 total, and minorities advanced less than 1%.

The yearlong study was based primarily on information in the companies’ annual reports, after the firms said demographic information, including gender and ethnicity, was proprietary, according to the center.

Five of the companies--McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed and Rockwell International--declined to confirm information taken from the annual reports and supplemented by further inquiries, the study said.

Spokesmen for two of the companies, however, confirmed the findings when contacted Thursday. General Dynamics noted that it has no women on its board or as corporate officers, and Rockwell acknowledged that it has one woman on its board.

A spokesman for Boeing, which was listed by the study as having no women or minorities on its board or as officers in 1990, said it actually had two women and one minority among its corporate officers that year.

Comparisons of the study’s results with surveys of general industry are difficult because of differences in the way that senior management posts are described. But defense contractors appeared to lag behind, according to a Labor Department study in 1991 of about 1,000 large companies. It found that 6.6% of 4,491 executive-level managers were women and 2.6% minorities.

The study noted that women appear to do better in securing high-level state and local government jobs; 19.8% of Cabinet-level state officials appointed by governors are women, according to a survey by the Center for Women in Government, an arm of the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy.