Gender,Education and Socio-economic Diversity in the Civil Service of Bangladesh: The Case of Administration Cadre

Abstract

This study explores the dynamics of the bureaucracy of Bangladesh, focusing on three main dimensions of diversity (demographic, informational and socio-economic) over 20 years from 2001 to 2020. In particular, the study investigates whether and how the distribution of administration cadre officials, in terms of gender, education and socio-economic status, has changed over this period and whether the pay scale of 2015 has affected the composition of officials working in the administration cadre service. In the case of gender (demographic) diversity, we found that the representation of female officials has gradually increased over time but showed a slight downward trend in the later periods. We have also found that since the introduction of the 8th pay scale, the bureaucracy has become more diversified regarding the officials’ educational (informational) background. In particular, the share of civil servants with an Engineering and Computer Science background has sharply increased during the 35th–37th BCS. In contrast, the share of officials with an Arts and Social Science background has dropped significantly. By analysing the education and occupational status of officials’ fathers, we observe that introducing the pay scale positively affects the diversity in bureaucracy by increasing the representation of officials from less well-off socio-economic backgrounds. Although the share of officials whose fathers were farmers showed an initial downward trend, it has marginally improved after introducing the pay scale. In a survey of admin cadre officials, we observed that the introduction of the pay scale had not affected the representation of officials from rural areas.

Keywords

Gender diversity socio-economic diversity representative bureaucracy rural representation

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