Are you the average public servant?

Most likely to be working full time at an APS6 level, Jenny has been in the public service for 11 years, and is most likely to have only worked at one agency in her career.

The Australian Public Service Commission published its State of the Service report on Monday, detailing the ways the face of the public service is changing, and the ways that it is staying the same.

While Canberra is synonymous with government, politics and public service, just 37.9 per cent of the 150,594 of public servants are based in the capital. The ACT does have the highest concentration of public servants though, with the next highest being in NSW (18.5 per cent) and Victoria on 17 per cent. Just 14 per cent of federal public servants work outside of a capital city.

While the stereotype may be of a boffin weighing up the economic impact of a new policy with complicated calculations, a quarter of public servants are like Jenny - working in service delivery, often having customer facing roles in offices like Centrelink. Another 15 per cent work in compliance and administration, followed by 12 per cent in administration. Just 4 per cent of public servants work in strategic policy, less than 7 per cent that work in IT.

Average Jenny is one of the 88,914 women who work for the APS, representing 59 per cent of employees while men account for 61,629 workers, or 41 per cent. That rate has been steady in the past 10 years, but women have outnumbered men since 1999. While there's more women than men, men outnumber women at higher levels, although that has been changing in recent years.

It's fair to assume average Jenny is from an English-speaking background, is able-bodied, doesn't identify as Indigenous or as LGBTI+. But the public service is making strides in its diversity and representation of marginalised groups. The number of people who identify as having a non-English speaking background is at 19 per cent and 22 per cent said they were born overseas, with both these figures steadily rising over the past 50 years. What has changed is where those born overseas have come from. In 1968, they were mostly from Europe, whereas now almost half of public servants born overseas are from Asia.

If we were talking about average Jenny 10 years ago, she would be younger than 43.4 - the current mean age of APS employees. In the past 10 years, the mean age of public servants has reflected the ageing population, going up from 41.4 years to 43.4 years.

Only in the past two years has the census given staff the opportunity to declare if they identify as LGBTI+, with 4.4 per cent doing so in 2018, slightly higher than the 4.1 per cent in 2017. The census also gives people the opportunity to say if they identify as "gender X" instead of male or female, representing 51 people in 2018.

The number of Indigenous employees in the public service has slowly been rising over the past 10 years, from 2.6 per cent in 2009 to 3.3 per cent in 2018. The report shows that Indigenous Australians are more likely to be employed at lower levels of the public service, with 27 per cent of Indigenous employees at APS4 level, and just 0.5 per cent of the senior executive ranks filled by Indigenous Australians.

Public servants who identified as having an ongoing disability in 2018 came in at 8.7 per cent, which is higher than the 3.7 per cent recorded by agencies' human resources systems. The Commission believes this is because disability is not necessarily static and employees who acquire a disability may not report it to their agency for their record.

In 2018 77 per cent of employees reported their agency was committed to creating a diverse workforce.

Do you know an average Jenny (or Michelle, or Sarah)? Send me an email sally.whyte@fairfaxmedia.com.au.