Home > Detailed reports > Section 5: Equal Employment Opportunity

The PS Act and the Commissioner's Directions require agencies to put in place Workplace Diversity Programs that promote diversity and help prevent discrimination. The APS Value on equity in employment requires in particular measures aimed at eliminating any employment-related disadvantage on the basis of:

• being an Indigenous Australian;
• sex;
• race or ethnicity; or
• physical or mental disability.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) data is supplied to agencies by individuals on a voluntary basis, and forwarded by agencies to be entered onto APSED. Overall, non-response varies widely between agencies.

People of non-english speaking backgrounds are classified into two groups. Group 1 refers to people born overseas who arrived in Australia after the age of five and whose first language was not English. Group 2 refers to children of migrants, including: those who were born overseas and arrived in Australia before the age of five but did not speak English as a first language; those who were Australian born but did not speak English as a first language and had at least one NESB parent; and those people who were Australian born and had neither parent speaking English as a first language.

Figure 14 shows the change in the representation of the four EEO groups from their proportion at June 1995. Each of these proportions is weighted by the ratio of the June 1995 total ongoing APS number to the number of employees in the respective EEO group at June 1995. Weighting eliminates the effects that the changes in the overall size of the APS have on representation. The index is given a value of 100 at June 1995, and rises and falls proportionally with the particular group's change in the weighted number over time. For example, at June 1995 the number of Indigenous Australians was 3,236 out of an ongoing APS population of 141,660. By 1998 the number of Indigenous Australians had dropped to 2,909 but the ongoing APS number had dropped further proportionally to 108,769. Therefore the weighted IA number for 1998 is 3788.7, which is about 117% of the original index.

Figure 10: Change in population, weighted and indexed, for EEO groups, 30 June 1995 to 30 June 2004

Source: APSED