FROM THE GLASS CEILING TO THE CONCRETE CEILING: RACE, GENDER, AND REPRESENTATIVE BUREAUCRACY IN THE BRAZILIAN FEDERAL CIVIL SERVICE (2012–2025)

Abstract

This paper examines the racial, gender, and socioeconomic composition of the Brazilian federal civil service between 2012 and 2025, bringing together the international literature on representative bureaucracy, diversity management, and social equity with recent Brazilian literature on intersectionality and occupational segregation in the public sector, and with data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD Contínua). It builds on the premise, formulated by Kingsley and systematized by Mosher, that a democratic state should reflect the diversity of the society it serves, distinguishing passive from active representation. The literature review shows that, while the international literature treats gender and race predominantly as separate axes, recent Brazilian scholarship — especially Pinheiro (2023) and Silva (2024) — develops the categories of “concrete ceiling” and “sticky floor” to describe a qualitatively more rigid barrier faced by Black women, distinct from the “glass ceiling” faced by white women. The analysis of PNAD Contínua data (2012-2025), stratified by racial and gender group, region, income bracket, and education, confirms this pattern: the underrepresentation of Black and Indigenous people is concentrated in higher income and education brackets, and a complementary comparison with the formal private sector (2013-2024) shows that the civil service is advantageous for most groups, but this advantage disappears for Black and Indigenous women. The paper concludes that passive representation, although increasing, has not yet translated into equivalent vertical mobility across the groups analyzed.