By Nick Mann | 29 April 2013
Women hold fewer than one in five top public sector jobs in Group of Twenty countries, although they make up almost half the public sector workforce, Ernst & Young said today.
The consultancy’s Worldwide index of women as public leaders report found that women comprise 51% of the population of the G20 leading nations and 48% of the public sector workforce. But they account for just 19.7% of the non-elected senior executive roles available.
There are only four G20 countries where women hold more than a third of leadership roles, the report also found.
These include Canada, where 45% of senior posts are held by women, Australia (37%), the UK (35%) and South Africa (33%), according to the report.
At the other end of the scale, women hold just 2.5% of leadership positions in Japan and none at all in Saudi Arabia.
Uschi Schreiber, global government and public sector leader for Ernst & Young, said the findings showed that more needed to be done to make the public sector truly representative.
‘In our globalising world, diversity is seen not only as an ambition but crucial to delivering more effective government and increased economic competitiveness,’ she noted. ‘But while diverse teams are proven to stimulate innovation and new ways of problem solving, there is an increasing acknowledgment that much work remains to be done before governments and business become truly representative of the societies in which they operate and serve.’
The report also found that, even in countries where women represent a large proportion of the overall public sector workforce, their representation in the top jobs is relatively low. In Germany, women account for 52% of the public sector workforce but just 15% of leadership roles, while in Russia, they constitute 71% of the total but only 13% of leaders.
Conversely, in Brazil, only 48% of public sector employees are women but they fill 32% of public sector leadership roles. Ernst & Young noted that Brazil has had a female president, Dilma Rousseff, since 2010, with a record 10 of the 39 ministerial posts in her government held by women.
According to the report, increasing the representation of women in top public sector posts requires legislative and policy action, such as quotas, as well as cultural change to address unconscious biases and to increase role models.
However, Ernst & Young warned that cuts in the public sector workforce in many G20 countries could lead to women’s opportunities taking a step back. In the UK, an estimated 710,000 public sector jobs are expected to be lost by 2017, with twice as many women losing their jobs as men, while 85% of the 74,000 US public sector jobs lost over the past year have been held by women.
