What is the sex of a civil servant’s colleagues? The first row of Table 4 presents the proportion of women in each of the surveys for which we have individual-level data. In all bar one of the countries we study, the civil service is a male dominated environment, with 60% of civil servants male. However, across the countries we study, the experience of the civil service varies substantially in terms of the gender make up of a civil servants’ colleagues. In Pakistan, only a fifth of civil servants are female while in the Phillippines two-thirds are.<sup>13</sup> The experience of the service is likely to be significantly different in an environment where two-thirds of staff are women compared with a fifth. The tantalising question arising from this variation is whether a female-dominated civil service is more productive than a male-dominated one.<sup>14</sup> Returning to our organization-level data across tiers of government, the gender balance within the civil service is not at parity at any tier of either Nigeria or Ethiopia. In both countries the state level is closest to parity. With recent increases in the number of women in Parliament in Ethiopia (39% of Parliamentarians in the World Development Indicators), women serve in Ethiopia’s government relatively equally across the legislative and executive arms.<sup>15</sup> A similar pattern is seen in Pakistan though at a much lower proportion, with 21% of Parliamentarians female. This is not true for Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria or the Philippines, where the proportion of Parliamentarians who are female is 11%, 17%, 6% and 27% respectively. In these latter countries therefore, women’s participation in government, limited though it may be, is typically in the implementation of policy rather than in its legislation.

# **Managers**

Work in the civil service is traditionally organized in a relatively hierarchical way, with directors delegating a subset of their duties to deputy directors and so on to the professional officers who undertake the ground work of the service. This hierarchical culture is particularly prominent in Nigerian and Ethiopian services, reflecting its prominence in their wider societies. The span of control is a way to measure the degree of hierarchy as it indicates the number of employees that report to a manager. Though the specific means of calculating it varies, the tables simply present the number of non-managerial staff in the entire survey divided by the number of managerial staff.

For the countries we study, the span of control varies considerably. Table 4 presents figures that range from 1.23 subordinates per manager to 6.65. In Nigeria and Ghana, the number of managers in the civil service, from assistant director through director or equivalent, is almost as large as the number of professional staff.

A challenge to comparing the span of control across countries is that the definition of manager is not constant, nor are the duties of an officer with a managerial grade. Some officers denoted manager would still undertake a substantial amount of policy work themselves. To compare within countries, we can return to the Nigeria and Ethiopia data for which we have multiple tiers of government. Interestingly, both Nigeria and Ethiopia have a U-shaped span of control across tiers, with the local level having the least managers per employee, with the second highest number of managers at the federal level, and

> 13The high proportion of women in our survey of civil servants in the Philippines corresponds to gender ratios calculated from administrative data there. The proportion of women in the entire Philippine civil service is 59% (Republic of the Philippines, 2010)

> 14To provide a more global perspective, UN (2016) states, “The latest ILO data for 49 developing and transition countries show wide variation in women’s share of employment in public administration, ranging from 19% in Guinea to 70% in Slovenia. Overall, the share of women in public sector employment exceeded their share in total employment in 46 out of 64 countries.”

> 15Interestingly, 92% of the Ethiopian organizations we study stated that they had an active policy that encourages women to apply for jobs in their organization. Again looking to UN (2016) for a global perspective, it states that, “A number of countries, including Colombia, Mongolia, the Philippines and South Sudan, have applied quotas or targets for women’s employment in the public sector.”

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