Yes, we have actually a specific charge under the Employment Equity Act to be responsible for removing barriers to employment in the public service. So we have been watching this fairly closely in terms of what kinds of barriers there are and what the numbers are looking like.
On the representivity side, if you take a number that reflects workforce availability, we are seeing overall that women are fairly represented, mainly a little bit over, in total, and the disabled are fairly represented, as are aboriginals, but there's a special issue with the aboriginal people. But visible minorities are under-represented from workforce availability.
If you look at the senior executive ranks, the representivity issues are more severe. I think there is under-representation across the board. So we have under-representation across the board in the senior executive ranks.
On the question of visibility minorities, it is one that bothers me in particular, in large part because of the extent to which our society is changing, and I think it's very important that our public service is reflective of the society it's there to serve.
We have initiated a study that we are terming the drop-off study, because what we have found is that in terms of applications to the public service, visible minorities are over-represented, and in terms of the actual jobs they get they are under-represented. We have undertaken a statistical study that shows what we're calling this drop-off. Now we are moving to doing more analysis on that to try to determine exactly where the barriers are and what it is that is causing this phenomenon of this high interest in the public service and yet when it comes to getting the jobs they're not getting the jobs in the proportions.
Linda is responsible for the work in this area. She might have something to add.