New study shows public sector is less diverse than private

Nick Elvin

A new survey into the diversity of staff working in the top 5,000 leadership roles within the public and voluntary sectors has revealed that ethnic minorities and women remain significantly under-represented.

The statistics also indicate that despite the legal obligation on public bodies to promote equality and diversity in their staff, their performance is worse in many areas than FTSE 100 companies.

The Green Park Public Service Leadership 5,000 survey, commissioned by executive recruitment consultancy Green Park, maps the gender and ethno-cultural diversity of selected board and executive leaders in public organisations and charities.

Among its findings, the survey shows that there are virtually no employees of black or Chinese/other Asian origin in the top four grades within the civil service. And, more generally ethnic minorities are under-represented in the senior civil service roles, relative to the population at large, by a factor of six to one.

The Department for International Development and the Treasury perform best on ethnic diversity in leadership roles, while the Home Office, Ministry of Justice and Department for Communities and Local Government are among the worst.

Of the 268 people in leadership roles in the most prominent public bodies outside government and local authorities – such as the Bank Of England, NHS England and the BBC, just six were non-white.

Compared to the gender make-up of both the population at large and the Civil Service itself, the senior ranks of government departments display a gender deficit of almost two to one, i.e. there are just over half the number of women in senior roles as there should be to achieve gender parity.

The best performing government departments for gender diversity are the Education and Health, with the worst two being the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence. Meanwhile, women who aspire to top jobs have better prospects in county councils than they do in urban authorities.

The voluntary sector performs better than both the public and private sectors on gender diversity, however, as in those sectors, women are under-represented at CEO level and just one in five chairs of charity boards is female.

Commenting on the findings, Trevor Phillips, Chair of Green Park Diversity Analytics said: “The organisations included in the Green Park Public Sector 5,000 all exist to serve the public and are supported in some way by the taxpayer. Because of this they carry a responsibility to engage the widest possible range of individuals as possible, above all in their leadership and governance.

“While our research does find some encouraging trends, such as the presence of women at senior roles in non-urban local authorities, other areas are much more disappointing. Bizarrely, London, the most diverse area of the country with a 40 per cent non-White population, shows a less diverse local authority leadership than the FTSE.

“It raises some serious questions for us if the leadership of public bodies looks less like Britain than private companies which are answerable only to their shareholders.”