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Kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve benchmarking van het interne gelijke kansen- en diversiteitsbeleid van de Vlaamse overheid
Executive summary
The Flemish government engages itself to reflect the diversity of society in its workforce. A diverse
workforce is important in many respects. A government that has a diverse workforce is more
recognizable for the people and is better equipped to take into account the needs of all groups of
society. Moreover, it is commonly accepted that diversity can have positive effects on the capacity to
innovate and on the creativity of groups or organizations. Finally, from a social perspective, it is
important that everybody can participate in the labor market.
The Flemish government defined four groups for its internal 1 diversity policy. For these four groups,
target figures were set: women in top management positions (33% in 2015), women in middle
management positions (33% in 2015), people from ethnic minorities (4% by 2015) and people with
disabilities (3% by 2015). Annually, the organizations (departments and agencies) from the different
policy domains have to report to the Department for Emancipation in order to evaluate progress
towards these targets. The finding is that certain target figures are difficult to achieve. This can be
partially explained by the current budget cuts that lead to a limitation of new recruitments.
In this context, the Department for Emancipation has commissioned the research project 'Quantitative
and qualitative benchmarking of the internal equal opportunities and diversity policy of the Flemish
government'. The purpose of this research project is twofold. One goal is to examine how the figures
on target groups in the workplace of the Flemish government relate to figures of other governments.
The other goal is to identify innovative, inspiring and successful practices or strategies in these
organizations in order to improve the equal opportunities and diversity policy of the Flemish
government. We focused particularly on the target groups the Flemish government defined for its
policy (men / women in middle and senior management, employees from ethnic minorities, people
with disabilities or chronic illness) as well as on policies for employees that are gay, lesbian, bisexual
or transgender.
The research project was carried out in two steps. The first step consisted of desk research. Based on
(online) available sources, the diversity policy of different private and public sector organizations 2 was
mapped. Several questions were asked. Which are their main target groups? How are they defined
and how is their presence monitored? Do they make use of target figures? How well are they doing
with regard to these target figures? And what are the main instruments and strategies of their policy?
The second step was a detailed analysis of the internal diversity policy of a number of public
organizations that are actively managing diversity. For this purpose, three local authorities were
selected. The federal government was analysed as well, including two specific departments. Finally,
two other central governments were included, namely the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Information was collected on the basis of written sources and interviews conducted in October and
November 2012.
Regarding the first objective of this study, we can conclude that a numerical comparison of the
presence of the target groups in the workplace is not obvious. In the first place, there is too much
variety in the definitions used by these governments for their target groups (e.g. of 'top and middle
management', of employees from ethnic minorities' and of 'people with a disability or chronic illness’).
1 The internal diversity policy of an organization is the diversity policy towards (future) staff members.
External diversity policy is the diversity policy towards society, but this is no subject of this research
project.
2 Local governments, the federal and Flemish government, the governments of seven other European countries
and some private organizations.
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