An "entirely new equality agenda within the Irish civil service" is recommended in a new report on gender equality in Government departments. It should outline targets to be met within a specific time-frame, it says.
The report, commissioned by an equality committee as part of the civil service's Strategic Management Initiative, found evidence of "misogyny" and a "macho culture" in some departments. Its executive summary, containing recommendations, was published last July, but the body of the report was not.
Its proposals include achieving a 50:50 balance in each grade within a "realistic and demanding" time-frame, pointing out that this would give no room for complacency, given that 64 per cent of civil servants are female.
However, the survey found that the lower grades in the service were overwhelmingly female, while the higher grades were dominated by men.
Specific proposals include monitoring recruitment, ensuring that gender is not a factor in placement, either geographically or within departments, training to improve management skills in this area, more transparency in the promotions procedures, and measures to reconcile the demands of work and family.
The report, which was written by a team headed by Dr Peter Humphreys of the Institute of Public Administration, included a detailed gender analysis of employment statistics in the civil service.
This found that while female staff accounted for 54 per cent of higher executive officers, their proportion tapered off higher up the scale. Only in the Central Statistics Office, Health, Education and Social Welfare did women comprise at least a third of staff at higher levels.
The departments with the lowest proportion of women at higher levels are Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands (17.5 per cent), Defence (21.7 per cent), Transport, Energy and Communications (25.4 per cent), Marine (25.9 per cent) and Finance (26.4 per cent).
Although some of this is due to the marriage bar which operated up to the 1970s, the report states that in general "women progress less rapidly than men from every shared recruitment grade".
"Progress towards achieving gender balance remains painfully slow and cannot be achieved at AP [assistant principal] level or higher under prevailing conditions," it says.
One of the factors cited as responsible for women being promoted less was that they were more likely to job-share than men. Only 1 per cent of male civil servants were job-sharing at the time of the survey, while 14 per cent of women were. Most of them did so in order to combine work and family commitments.
Job-sharing had a negative image within the service among both women and men, and was thought to imply a reduced commitment to the job, and have an adverse effect on promotion prospects.
Almost one in seven civil servants felt they had been discriminated against because of their gender. However, this broke down into one in four women (24 per cent) and fewer than one in 10 men (nine per cent).
Three departments were selected for in-depth study with the help of volunteer focus groups. These were Social, Community and Family Affairs, Enterprise, Trade and Employment and Finance.
All three showed a sense that women were excluded from the "core" of the Department. "Certain locations or types of work [were] seen as more valuable than others in terms of career prospects and aspirations," according to the report.
It comments: "What is important to this study is the strong correlation between the core, with concentrations of male senior staff, and the periphery, with concentrations of less senior and/or female staff.
"Management at the `core' in most Government departments is an almost exclusively male domain. This segregated pattern both reflects and helps to perpetuate the exclusion . . . of female staff with regard to key strategic sections within some departments.
"One of the most frequently noted consequences of this gender segregation is that it allowed a `misogynist' or `macho culture' to prevail at the apex or core. This perception is held most strongly in one particular Department. In contrast, another case study Department is noted by senior managers, both within and outside that Department, as being comparatively encouraging of women at higher levels."
While civil servants were reluctant to state publicly which Department was perceived as having a "macho culture", one trade unionist said the Department of Finance recruited a lot of women at administrative officer (graduate) level, but they did not seem to progress beyond assistant principal grade.
Of the three departments selected for focus group study, Finance had the lowest proportion of women at senior levels, while Social, Community and Family Affairs had the highest.
A high-level management committee, chaired by Ms Josephine Feehily of the Revenue Commissioners, is drafting an equality strategy for the civil service, which will be put to the unions for discussion when completed.