Less than one in three senior Public Servants across the Governments of G20 countries are women, the Global Government Forum’s latest edition of its Women Leaders Index has found.
Only one G20 country, Canada, has reached gender parity in the top five grades of its Public Service (at 51.1 per cent), with four more are within 10 percentage points of doing so.
However, there has been improvement – the G20 mean (29.3 per cent) has increased by 1.6 percentage points since the last Index in 2020 and by six points since the first one 10 years ago.
Those leading the G20 pack behind Canada are Australia and South Africa, which tie in second place, followed by the United Kingdom and Brazil, with Mexico and the European Commission tied in fifth place.
Mexico has increased the representation of women in Public Service leadership positions the most of all G20 nations, by a dramatic 24.3 percentage points over the past decade, while South Africa has made the most improvement in the two years since the last Index — a jump of 7.2 points.
Bringing up the G20 rear are Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea, China and Turkey, in which representation of women in the senior Public Service is between 2.5 per cent and 11.7 per cent.
Countries including Germany, Italy, France and the United States reside in the middle of the G20 ranking, with women accounting for between 32 per cent and 38 per cent of top roles.
Though the G20 has traditionally been the main ranking in the Women Leaders Index, it also analyses representation of women in the highest grades of national Public Services in European Union and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
Latvia, where women account for 56 per cent of the top tiers of its Public Service, tops the OECD ranking, while six more — Sweden, Iceland, New Zealand, Greece, Canada and Slovakia — have reached or exceeded gender parity.
Washington, 25 November 2022
