Gender diversity in the senior ranks of the federal bureaucracy has become the talk of the town, with both major parties vying to demonstrate which is doing more to advance it. In April, the Coalition launched Balancing the Future: The Australian Public Service Gender Equality Strategy 2016-19, which focused on "changing culture through leadership, flexibility, and innovation". And more recently, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called for a 50:50 split in the ranks of the senior executive service (women currently hold about 41 per cent of positions).
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Labor says it will implement a new gender equality program targeting the entire workforce if it wins office, and that it will charge the Office for Women with coordinating and leading those efforts. Aside from making blind hiring for graduate jobs a mandatory public service requirement, Labor's also set itself an ambitious target: ensuring that women make up 50 per cent or more of the boards of federal government agencies by the end of its first term.
Senior bureaucrats, too, are also trumpeting the need for more women in their ranks, with Immigration Department secretary Michael Pezzullo recently telling a "women in leadership" conference that nothing less than "an insurgency and revolution" is required to disrupt male dominance within the SES.
The solutions generally advanced for increasing the diversity of senior management ranks and boards are often binary: disruption of the kind hinted at by Mr Pezzullo or incremental change. Unsurprisingly, Labor leans towards disruption (or affirmative action) as a more effective approach, whereas the Coalition generally puts its faith in cultural or gradual change. Both approaches have drawbacks, however.
Mandatory targets can be effective in cutting through lazy or entrenched workplace attitudes. If implemented too quickly, however, they can also lower morale and create a legacy of resentment. Labor's target of 50 per cent female representation on government boards within three years would seem to fall into this category. The likely disruption will outweigh the gains, and the initiative may well come to be viewed as an empty gesture.
Gradualism, too, has drawbacks, not least being the tendency of large organisations like the public service towards inertia. And for so long as women are in a minority in senior management cadres, their perspectives, their skills of innovation, and their leadership are denied to society more broadly.
If cultural change is preferable to prescriptive change – and that's moot – it must come from the top. It must also be supportive rather than peremptory. Capable women will respond more favourably to mentoring (and to being listened to attentively) than they will to the sort of "friendly push" that Mr Pezzullo told his audience he'd bestowed on a hesitant female colleague.
When it comes to placing women in senior public sector roles, Australia is second only to Canada among the G20 group of nations. That said, the debate about how women can play a more significant role in government must continue.