Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what targets the Government has set for gender representation in the civil service.

In the 2017 Civil Service Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Strategy we committed to increasing transparency around our workforce composition by creating a D&I dashboard on GOV.UK, through which we publish quarterly updates on gender in the Civil Service.

The dashboard shows that overall, 53.9% of the Civil Service were women in 2019. This varies by grade from 45.0% in the Senior Civil Service (SCS), to 45.3% at G6, 47.5% at G7, 50% at HEO/SEO, 56.1% at EO and 57.2% at AA/AO level. The overall percentage of female civil servants has remained fairly stable since 2010 but for the SCS, the percentage of women has increased each year.

We currently publish individual department’s gender data on the D&I dashboard but this does not currently include a breakdown by Civil Service grade.

Our data shows that we continue to make steady and positive progress on representation of women across the grades, therefore we have not set Civil Service-wide targets on gender.