The Equality and Diversity page on the HMRC website is here. An extract:
“We will build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, reflective of all the communities we serve across all grades, groups, and regions. We will:
- increase the proportion of colleagues who voluntarily declare their diversity characteristics in our online HR system to 85%, to enable more accurate equality analysis of employee experience and outcomes
- increase diversity at our most senior levels, measured via representation rates of women, disabled and ethnic minority, Black and Asian colleagues at Grade 7, Grade 6 and Senior Civil Service roles [J4MB: we know from the MoD reply to a FoI request that the basic salary for a Grade 7 civil servant is £57,670 – £63,390 p.a.]
- ensure our promotion and recruitment processes are merit-based, measured by equality analysis of the outcomes of selection decisions”
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that objective #2 is in conflict with objective #3. As for the latter, how on earth can “equality analysis of the outcomes of selection decisions” measure that “promotion and recruitment processes are merit-based”? Nonsense on stilts.
Of course, the statement “We will build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, reflective of all the communities we serve across all grades, groups, and regions” is ridiculous. The unasked question, as always, is why the workforce should be “reflective of all the communities”. It’s a scam, in part, to increase female representation at the “most senior levels”. Female representation across the HMRC as a whole will surely already be in excess of that in “all the communities”, as it is across the public sector.
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Justice for Men & Boys 
Unusually for a Gov. Dept the Gender (well sex in fact) split is not as overwhelmingly Female, being 34,257 female employees against Male 29,582. HMRC has 44,812 full time employees and 19,027 part time employees. Unsurprisingly we are told 77% of part time employees are “women”. This being the case you might expect that those evil males to be lauding it over the females in the management grades, given those males are in work more “toxic” presentism and working longer being male crimes. However in fact the breakdown of sex at each grade level shows men are just 54% of the senior grades when men are just over 46% of the workforce. Given that men are far more likely to work full time this result hardly looks like the patriarchy’s evil machinations but a reflection of the work patterns in the workforce. By the way the LGBT data and Ethnicity data show the HMRC is representative already if matched with census data.
So as you say there appears little need to do anything at all unless its to appoint a few more part time females to senior grades. to reach the magic 54.7% of the total workforce that is female. This of course would have nothing to do with the merits of candidates, and be irrelevant to “representing the community”. But as you say may give a few more women some well paid sinecures to massage the figures.
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