The 10-point diversity plan to be announced by the government today is aimed at breaking down barriers to women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities at the top of the 520,000-strong civil service over the next three years.

As a whole, the civil service does relatively well on diversity. Some 52 per cent of permanent staff are women and 4.2 per cent have a disability.

Just over 8 per cent come from ethnic minorities, when the proportion of the whole workforce that are economically active and are from ethnic minorities is 7.2 per cent.

But it does much less well in the senior ranks. About 29 per cent of the top 3,000 or so civil servants, who are classified as the senior civil service, are women, against a target for this year of 35 per cent and for 2008 of 37 per cent.

Among the very highest ranks - the top management posts such as director and permanent secretary - women make up 25 per cent, against a 2008 target of 30 per cent.

These figures compared favourably with the private sector but were not yet good enough, Waqar Azmi, chief diversity adviser to the Cabinet Office, told a conference yesterday. "We want to go on increasing the numbers to be representative of the whole population."

In the senior civil service, a mere 3.3 per cent come from ethnic minorities against a 4 per cent target for 2008, and 2.3 per cent are people with disabilities against a 2008 target of 3.2 per cent.

Suma Chakrabarti, the permanent secretary at the Department for International Development since 2002, was the first non-white person to be appointed to the most senior official level in a department.

The diversity initiative, to be announced by John Hutton, minister for the Cabinet Office, and Sir Gus O'Donnell, cabinet secretary, will for the first time give permanent secretaries an incentive in terms of their appraisal and remuneration to give a boost to under-represented groups in the senior ranks.

"For the first time these targets are being included in every single permanent secretary's pay and bonus," said Mr Azmi.

A senior Cabinet Office official said the move would directly link the people "with the greatest levers to pull" with the drive for improvement in diversity in the top ranks of the service.

The plan will also include zero tolerance of discrimination and harassment, the integration of diversity targets into the objectives of all civil servants and greater intervention to encourage employees from under-represented groups who have been on "talent development programmes" to progress up the ranks. There will be encouragement, too, for recruitment agencies to put forward female, ethnic minority and disabled candidates for jobs.

Carolyn McCall, who chairs Opportunity Now, the business campaign to increase women's representation in the workplace, told the conference that targets were only part of the answer.

"The much larger part is about leadership at the top and changing some cultural norms," said Ms McCall, who is chief executive of Guardian Newspapers. "One of the key things is cultural barriers [to women with families], such as meetings that start at 7.30am or 7pm . . . Often women aren't confident enough about making the business case for flexibility to their employers."

The civil service initiative is partly aimed at overcoming such barriers, with the intention that all senior civil service posts should be open to flexible working arrangements, with exceptions only where there is "robust justification", in Mr Azmi's words.

"No other organisation has done this in terms of a blanket rule," he said. Currently, such arrangements varied from department to department and "we want a cross-service consistency".

He also said there was evidence that people with disabilities were not confident about speaking openly about their condition.

An anonymous survey had found that 15 per cent of civil servants said they had a disability, but only just over 4 per cent had officially declared themselves to be disabled.

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