Chapter 5: Equity and diversity

Abbreviations

A list of the abbreviations used in this report is available in the Glossary

Workplace diversity

The Public Service Act 1999 requires that agency heads establish workplace diversity programmes to assist in giving effect to the APS Values. This year, 81 agencies (96%) indicated that they had a workplace diversity programme in place. The three agencies without a programme were all small agencies.

Of those agencies with a workplace diversity programme only 56% have a formal framework in place to evaluate the effectiveness of their programme. Fifty-four per cent of agencies had reviewed their programme in the last two years and 19% over three years ago, but 26% have never evaluated their programme.

Under the Public Service Commissioner’s Directions, agency heads are required to put in place measures in their agency aimed at removing employment disadvantage on the basis of gender, being an Aboriginalor Torres Strait Islander, race or ethnicity, and physical or mental disability. This section assesses how effective agencies have been in each of these areas and in the area of age diversity.

APSED and the quality of EEO data

Information on the representation of EEO groups in the APS comes from individual agencies and is stored on the Australian Public Service Employment Database (APSED). The provision of EEO data by APS employees to their agency is voluntary (with the exception of sex). APSED tends to under-represent the actual number of employees in these groups.

Of the data supplied to APSED in the snapshots sent by agencies at 30 June 2006, only one-third of employees had comprehensive EEO data: Indigenous status was provided for 52% of employees, and data on disability was provided for 48%. Data quality was better for country of birth (64%) and first language spoken (67%).

In practice, the quality of data on APSED is much better than these figures indicate, as historical data is generally better than that provided by agencies on an annual basis. Once an employee’s data is provided to APSED, it is stored there permanently unless the employee subsequently chooses not to provide it. If the person moves to another agency that does not provide this information then the previous data is retained. For the voluntary EEO items this year, Indigenous status is available for 72.4% of ongoing employees, disability status is available for 68.7% of ongoing employees, and non-English speaking background status is available for 70.7% of ongoing employees.

There was some improvement in overall data quality this year, however, the quality of employee-provided data supplied to APSED continues to be poor and there are many agencies still providing no data on the diversity status of the majority of their employees. As a number of these agencies are among the largest in the APS, this result is unsatisfactory and improvements need to be made.

There may be a number of reasons why employees may choose not to provide data on their EEO status to their agency. MAC’s recent report Employment of People with Disability in the APS found that the most significant reasons for people with disability choosing not to disclose their disability status was concern or fear of stigma or discrimination arising from that disclosure.¹ However, it also found a high incidence of deficiencies in the way in which personal data was collected, most notably, that participants had disclosed their disability to their manager, but that information was not necessarily captured in their HR records or APSED data.

Data from the employee survey found that two-thirds of employees with disability believed that they had informed their agency that they had a disability and only 18% of employees had chosen not to inform their agency. This question was included in the employee survey as a direct response to the MAC report. Reasons for not informing were generally consistent with MAC’s report including privacy reasons, and fear that information would not be kept confidential. Some employees also stated that their disability did not affect their ability to perform their job.

Data on why other groups choose or choose not to self report was not collected through the employee survey this year. However, the 2004 employee survey found that only 9% of Indigenous Australians, 11% of people with disability and 9% of employees from non-English speaking backgrounds had chosen not to inform their agency of their EEO status.

Agencies report that the use of mechanisms to collect EEO data from new employees is widespread. Almost three-quarters of agencies request new employees complete and return a paper form and a minority use an online form or provide both paper and online forms as an option. Agencies, however, are less likely to update employee records, with 31% indicating they have never conducted an agency review of disability. The continuing high levels of ‘no data’ suggest that agencies need to review the effectiveness of their data collection for new employees, and implement more rigorous processes to update data. The Commission is working with agencies to improve the quality of EEO data provided to APSED.

Employees for whom no data is available are included in the population for calculating percentages. Therefore, the percentages provided on representation of EEO groups in the APS are likely to under-estimate the actual proportions in agency and APS populations. All APSED data in this chapter, and also for the diversity analysis in Chapter 2, only covers ongoing employees. This is due to the poor quality of diversity data provided by agencies for non-ongoing employees, which is even lower than that for ongoing employees.

Trends in representation of EEO groups

Outcomes for women in the APS continued to improve in 2005–06, as did to a lesser extent the representation of people from non-English speaking backgrounds. There were continuing falls, however, in the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people with disability.

At June 2006, women accounted for 55.8% of ongoing employees, up from 54.2% at June 2005.² For people from a non-English speaking background,³ there was growth in both actual numbers and proportional representation (up from 5.4% in 2005 to 5.6% in 2006).

The proportion of Indigenous Australians continued to fall this year, from 2.2% to 2.0% of ongoing staff. This result was in line with the representation of Indigenous Australians in the employee survey, also 2%. Representation of people with disability fell from 3.8% to 3.4% over the year.This was lower than the representation of people with disability in the employee survey at 5%.

Both these groups declined in both actual number and proportion, despite strong growth in the broader APS.

Representation of Indigenous Australians and people with disability is somewhat lower in Medicare Australia (new to the APS this year) than in the APS overall and this has had some impact on total numbers. However, even after excluding Medicare Australia, the representation of both groups was still lower than it was in June 2005. For Indigenous Australians the representation rate would have been 2.1% and for people with disability, 3.5%.

The proportional representation for all EEO groups over the past 10 years is shown in Table 5.1.

Table 5.1: Representation of EEO groups among ongoing employees, 1997 to 2006⁴
	1997 (%)	1998 (%)	1999 (%)	2000 (%)	2001 (%)	2002 (%)	2003 (%)	2004 (%)	2005 (%)	2006 (%)
Women	48.1	48.6	49.0	49.9	51.4	51.9	52.8	53.1	54.2	55.8
Indigenous Australians	2.6	2.7	2.7	2.5	2.5	2.5	2.5	2.4	2.2	2.0
People with disability	5.3	5.1	4.8	4.5	4.2	4.0	3.9	4.0	3.8	3.4
NESB1	5.5	5.5	5.3	5.3	5.3	5.3	5.2	5.3	5.4	5.6
Source: APSED

Trends in representation for each of these groups are discussed in the following sections.

Agency commitment to workplace diversity

Employees generally believe their agencies have a strong commitment to workplace diversity.

This year saw an increase in the proportion of employees agreeing that their organisation is committed to creating a diverse workforce (67% compared to 61% in 2005). This result is generally consistent with results in a range of other jurisdictions. In 2005, 65% of Tasmanian respondents, 51% of Victorian respondents and in 2006, 64% of Western Australian respondents agreed that their agency is committed to creating a diverse workforce.⁵

There were some differences in perceptions of agencies’ commitment to creating a diverse workforce across different groups of employees. In particular, EL employees were less likely to agree than APS or SES employees. Women were more positive than men about their agency’s commitment to creating a diverse workforce. Indigenous employees and employees from non-English speaking backgrounds had similar results to those not in these groups, with employees with disability the least positive (58% compared to 68% for those without disability).

Employees in medium agencies were less likely to agree that their agency was committed to creating a diverse workforce than employees in small or large agencies. Of the 23 large agencies, employee agreement ranged from a low of 50% to a high of 79%. Large agencies with agreement rates significantly above the APS average were ABS, ATO, DEST, DIMA, and Medicare Australia.

The majority of employees were also satisfied against two composite employee engagement factors relating to the extent to which agencies encourage the recruitment and retention of employees from diverse groups (‘Diversity-recruitment and retention’-73%), and the extent to which certain diversity characteristics did not act as barriers to employment (‘Diversity-barriers’-63%).⁶ There was some variation in results for the questions about individual EEO groups that make up these factors and these are discussed in more detail below.

Management Advisory Committee 2006, Employment of People with Disability in the APS, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra
If Medicare Australia had not moved into coverage under the Public Service Act 1999, women’s representation would have been 54.8%—an increase of 0.6 percentage points.
In the absence of alternative measures, the concept ‘NESB’, representing people from a non-English speaking background, is used with APSED. This captures information about first language spoken, place of birth and parents’ language. NESB1, the measure reported here, includes people born overseas whose first language was not English. NESB2 has previously been reported in addition to NESB1 and includes children of migrants, including those who were born overseas and arrived in Australia before the age of five and did not speak English as a first language, those who were Australian born but did not speak English as a first language and had at least one NESB1 parent, and those who were Australian born and neither of whose parents spoke English as a first language. Analysis of APSED data has found that this group does not have a substantial disadvantage compared to other workers, and it is therefore not reported on here.
Due to improvements in the quality of historical data, proportions in this table may differ from those published in previous years.
The jurisdictional comparison data from surveys conducted in 2004–05 and 2005–06 was provided to the Commission by the State Services Authority, Victoria (People Matter Survey 2005); the Office of the State Service Commissioner, Tasmania (State Service Employee Survey 2005); and the Office of the Public Sector Standards Commissioner, Western Australia (Climate Survey 2005–06). While the Victorian and Tasmanian surveys covered the jurisdiction, the Victorian jurisdictional comparison data was based on web-based responses only. The Western Australian Climate Survey involved 14 agencies—each year 10–15 agencies are surveyed with each agency being surveyed approximately once every 5 years.
See Appendix 4 for further details of the factor analysis.

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