Conclusions
57. It is clear that all the Agencies are making progress on gender
diversity, and the benefits of this should start to be seen on both
operational and corporate effectiveness. It is equally clear that the
problems faced by each organisation are nuanced and therefore a ‘one
size fits all’ approach is unlikely to be effective. Greater collaboration
on diversity between the Agencies, with their partner Agencies
around the world, and possibly private industry, would no doubt bring
benefits.
Cross-fertilisation: it’s not just the UK
We are aware that there are regular cross-Agency meetings that take
place at different levels of the organisations. While we commend the
Agencies for these, we also believe that more can be made of them.
While we would encourage the sharing of best practice so that the
Agencies can learn lessons from each other, particularly on ways of
tackling cultural issues, there will be opportunities to burden-share,
for instance on policies and strategies. We would strongly urge that
a more formal approach is taken to this work under the direction of a
cross-Agency, top-level ‘diversity taskforce’, which would include the
Board-level Diversity Champions.
We are aware that one of the barriers to greater collaborative working
that is often cited is that the three Agencies are quite different in
terms of the work they do and the skills they value. If they cannot
look to each other, then the answer is to look elsewhere. The UK
Agencies have strong working relationships with their counterparts in
a number of countries – particularly the US. Where there are shared
values and a close working relationship, there should be no reason
why that cannot extend to workforce issues as well as operational
issues. Tackling gender diversity is not something that the UK needs
to do in isolation: we are sure we can learn from the approaches and
initiatives of our allies.
Changing the culture
58. One of the key themes that recurred during our visits to the
Agencies is the extent that cultural and behavioural issues can prevent
progress on diversity issues. The culture of an organisation cuts across
all of those key points in the career cycle that we have raised in this
Report. Whilst the Agencies have introduced a number of processes
and mechanisms to deal with diversity issues, changing the culture is
the one area that is most difficult to articulate and, crucially, to take
action on.
59. Even during our more recent visits, we sensed that leadership
values are only slowly moving with the times and the value of a more
consultative, collaborative approach is not always recognised. We
are very concerned that this maintains an ‘alpha male’ management
culture that rewards those who speak the loudest, or are aggressive
in pursuing their career (and of course this can discriminate against
less aggressive men as well as women). One of the key conclusions
of the HayGroup ‘Women in Whitehall’ report is that the culture and
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