The first woman to lead Australia's Foreign Affairs department says she has never faced sexism or discrimination in her career, but acknowledged the federal public service needs to do more work to promote diversity.
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Frances Adamson, a former Australian ambassador to China and 30-year veteran of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said there was a lack of female representation when she started as a graduate and landmark 1980s sex discrimination laws gave women an expectation equal representation would soon be achieved.
Ms Adamson, appointed by the Turnbull government to lead the department in 2016, told a Lowy Institute podcast her entry cohort in February 1985 was the first to include more women than men.
"I think initially, my sense, and these things are always a bit hard absolutely to know, the sense of my cohort as we joined that year on February 4, 1985, was that the department was asking itself a question.
"Were we, the women in the cohort, there on merit or were we there because of some bending of the rules or some new arrangement or some quota or some something?
"As I recall anyway... a bit of a frisson went through the place but I really felt that settled down pretty quickly. There were certainly women who'd been in the place for longer who were so of quite helpful.
"I, to be perfectly frank, never and have never in my time in the public service, had a sense of experiencing any kind of discrimination, but there just weren't many women around.
"I think my cohort kind of expected as we were the first [with gender parity] that things would change dramatically, that there would be even numbers happening everywhere."
One of the most senior women in the federal bureaucracy, Ms Adamson said more work was needed in 2017 to achieve meaningful diversity.
"Of course that wasn't the case and 32 years on now, there's still a fair job of work to be done around that, ensuring that as a nation, as a public service, as a department, as a foreign service, that we're able to draw to the full extent we need to... on the diversity of the workforce we have and the broader diversity of Australians," she said.
The comments are in contrast to former Finance Department secretary Jane Halton, who said in June she had faced gender discrimination in the public service.
"I used to believe that there wasn't a glass ceiling, and there is," Ms Halton said. "I very clearly know the first moment my head hit it, absolutely very, very clearly."
Ms Adamson, a former senior foreign policy adviser to Mr Turnbull and former deputy high commissioner to the United Kingdom, said she agreed with her departmental predecessor Peter Varghese that DFAT faced a challenge in promoting deep thinking and handling of complex issues.
"It's certainly the case that a focus on the corporate side of the business, a focus on service delivery, can crowd out those things but I think with determined effort and with careful thought it is possible to do it," she said.
"Certainly the work he started on re-emphasising the importance of strategic thinking and policy development in the department is something I've wanted to very much encourage.
"I think as the environment around us is characterised by uncertainty and considerable change, we need to be able to not just think more deeply about the future but use a whole range of analytical techniques to help us do that better."
