Labour has questioned the gender balance at the top of the civil service, pointing out that fewer than a quarter of the members of the Civil Service Board are women.
The Civil Service Board is the organisation's top collective leadership body, and is chaired by cabinet secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. Its membership includes civil service chief executive John Manzoni and senior departmental permanent secretaries.
The most recent breakdown of the Civil Service Board – published in March – shows that there were just three female senior officials at its top level.
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According to the Cabinet Office, the three women on the Board include HMRC chief executive Lin Homer, who has since left Whitehall, and Department of Health perm sec Una O'Brien, who is set to depart the civil service at the end of this month.
The Board's membership also includes Department for Communities and Local Government perm sec Melanie Dawes, who acts as Whitehall's gender diversity champion – but the rest of the board's 13 members are men.
Highlighting the gap, shadow Cabinet Office minister Louise Haigh told CSW that ministers "like to talk the talk about diversity but not if that means appointing women, BAME or working class candidates to positions of power.
"The truth is, those at the top of government prefer it to look and sound just like them. If they were serious about showing leadership on diversity then would we really have an all-white, male Cabinet office team and an almost-all-white male civil service board?”
Responding to a parliamentary question on the diversity of the board, Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock said: "Appointments to the Civil Service Board are made by the chair and are selected from the pool of permanent secretaries who are heads of department.
"Board membership is reviewed on an ongoing basis and diversity is always a key consideration when making new appointments."
Female representation is also low on the Corporate Management Board, a sub-board of the CSB which oversees departmental strategy and functions. The latest breakdown shows that only Homer sat on this group of ten senior officials.
However, women do outnumber men on the People Board, another sub-group which looks at diversity, workforce strategy, pay, and employee retention. Of that board's sixteen members, nine are women, according to the latest list. The membership of the People Board includes officials below perm sec level.
Despite the findings, the broader picture on female representation in the Senior Civil Service shows that there has been an improvement in recent decades.
Institute for Government analysis shows that, while 17% of top-ranking officials were women when the Senior Civil Service was established in 1996, the figure now stands at 39.4%. However, the relative balance across the wider civil service – where women comprise 53.9% of the total workforce – is still not reflected at the most senior level.
Last year, perm secs were set specific objectives for improving the diversity of their departments for the first time, with progress on the goals used in the annual performance reviews which have a bearing on their overall pay package.