The senior civil service must offer a better work-life balance or risk deterring women from applying for top roles, Scottish government permanent secretary Leslie Evans has said.
In a wide-ranging interview with CSW, Evans — the first woman to lead the Scottish civil service and one of only four female permanent secretaries across the UK at present — said it was “disappointing” that the number of women at the very top of the organisation had “gone down, rather than even plateaued” in recent years.
“I think there’s a number of reasons why that’s happened,” she said. “We always say it takes time – and I am impatient for change, but it does take time. I also think people sometimes look at these jobs and think: ‘Do I want to do that job?’ And, seeing it done in a particular way: ‘Does that feel right for me?’”
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The Scottish government perm sec said she believed that there were still “ingrained and rather old fashioned” views of what perm sec and director general roles involved that could be stopping women from putting their names forward.
Evans – who revealed that the Scottish government had just filled a director-general post in a "really meaty, high-profile policy area" with a job share for "two really able women" – recalled a recent conversation with a female member of staff who was unsure about whether or not to apply for a senior role.
“She said to me: ‘I still want to be able to have the choice about being at home to make the Easter bonnets with my children, because nobody else will be there to do it.’ And I absolutely understood that."
Evans said that while senior civil servants often had to "make sacrifices", the organisation could not expect to "work them like a madman or madwoman" at the expense of family life.
“So my frustration is, how do we make an organisation work that allows people to have that kind of parental and human fulfilment and still have stretching, satisfying roles at the most senior levels of government?"
“I don’t think we’re describing those roles, and people aren’t seeing them in a way that they can relate to. And that might be one of the reasons why we’re not getting where we need to be on this.”