ABSTRACT
The men and women presently (1966) working as administrative Civil Servants are not markedly distinct in their basic social characteristics. The sample of administrative Civil Servants surveyed for the Fulton Committee in 1966 showed that both men and women administrators came predominantly (in the order of 75 per cent) from non-manual backgrounds, both sexes have the same substantial proportion (25 per cent) of fathers who were Civil Servants and were both for the most part (60 per cent) born in the Southern and Midland regions of England. In terms of educational experience men and women administrators are similar in that just over two thirds of them have a first degree from a university, the university being in the majority of cases Oxford, Cambridge or London, and the degree in the vast majority of cases being in Arts and the Social Sciences. Similar proportions of male and female administrators have entered the class directly (62 per cent), by transfer from another class (5 per cent) and promotion from other classes where graduate recruitment is not normal (33 per cent). The two populations do have their shades of difference. A slightly larger percentage of the women came from non-manual backgrounds, went to fee-paying schools, have a university degree and that in a non-science subject. The difference between the sexes is perceptibly stronger when one considers university attended; London has supplied something like one quarter of the women administrators, but only one tenth of the male administrators. The strongest difference between male and women administrators lies in their marital experience, over 80 per cent of the men are married but under 35 per cent of the women are. This difference in marital experience is not the result of a markedly different age structure between men and women, 11 per cent of male administrators are under 30 years of age as are 16 per cent of the women. In both sexes the largest group is that now aged between 46 and 50.
