Gendered formal and informal rules in the Brazilian Senior Executive Service.

Senior civil services around the world are overwhelmingly populated by men, despite the fact that women’s status has been significantly improved in different societal sectors in the last decades, from educational gains to greater participation in the labour market. In Brazil, it is not different. Women constitute a minority of the senior bureaucrats- just over 23%, a figure that increased only 7% since 1999. In the lower echelons, women achieve similar rates as men, but the sex differences in post allocation augment as we move forward the bureaucratic hierarchy, with men being disproportionally concentrated in the highest levels. Working with the Brazilian case, in my research I examine senior civil servants who are appointed by the president and ministers on a discretionary criterion. I refer to those who occupy these positions as political bureaucrats because they have a crucial power in the formulation and implementation of public policies, as well as both a political and a bureaucratic role. Formal appointment rules were, until recently, fairly minimal, and the realm of the top executive appointments in Brazil is still a black box. Much of the literature has concentrated on the nature of the political appointments and the role of the political bureaucrats in coalition-building. Relying mostly upon large N statistical data, and often taking gender as an individual attribute, the specialised literature rarely takes gender as a vital category that explains and shapes the observed patterns of inequality. To fill this lacuna, my research puts gender in the centre of attention by adopting a Feminist Institutionalism (FI) approach, which gives centrality to the ways in which gender shapes institutional behaviour and reproduces inequalities. I examine the formal and informal appointment rules and norms to shed light on the ways they are gendered and how they help to maintain and reproduce gendered institutional behaviours. To do so, I combine documental analyses of the decree-laws that establish and change the formal “rules of the game” with 40 semi-structured elite interviews conducted with political bureaucrats who occupied high-echelon posts in the last 10 years. I focus on political bureaucrats within two main issue areas: social and economic. My preliminary data shows that the main venue to access political bureaucratic posts in Brazil is through professional networks, build along with the career. The data also reveals that critical actors had an important role in introducing key changes to increase the number of women in senior positions, during the period from 2011-to 2016.