Introduction to the issue

When Academic Women in Public Administration (AWPA) first released our call for this symposium on women and public administration, I did not know what to expect. After all, it has not been all that long since Camilla Stivers (1995) implored the field to examine our often-ignored gendered origins. Alternatively, the growing number of women in academic jobs in public administration; the plurality of women students in NASPAA accredited programs (Wang, 2018); the popularity of AWPA, the Section for Women in Public Administration (SWPA) of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), Women in the Public Sector (WPS), and other groups; and the #metoo movement has brought issues of gender to the forefront of discussions in the field. I should not have been worried: the response to the call for papers was prodigious. The number of exceptional papers far exceeded the space in the symposium, so you will be seeing articles on this topic in future issues of JPAE.

There are so many directions this symposium could have taken. As I review this issue, I am left with a sense that much has been uncovered. People identifying as women or non-binary face many invisible challenges (Rauhaus & Carr, 2019) in public administration. As a field, we are often told public administrators must be apolitical, neutral, and unbiased. Yet, that is not possible. While literature has not completely ignored the role of women in public administration, many consequences of this neutrality ideal remain. The articles in this symposium reveal many illustrations of the tensions and challenges facing women. They encourage us as educators to bring them to light, to contest the idea of an apolitical, neutral, and unbiased public administration, to provoke our students to think in new ways, to explore often ignored or invisible realities. When we reject what “Is Known”, where will we be? How can we teach our students to scrutinize the dominant narrative and its assumptions? What does the public administration field look like under this new paradigm? The articles in this symposium start to answer these questions.

In the first article, Bishu, Guy, and Heckler (2019) illuminate the danger of gender blindness and the idea common in organizational theory of a genderless, disembodied bureaucrat. They argue instead for a critical gender cognizant theory that centers gender in the workplace by examining the relationship between gender, structural factors within an organization, and the nature of work.

The dangers of gender blindness do not just exist in the field – they also exist in academia. While public affairs departments are increasing their gender diversity, Edwards, Holmes, and Sowa (2019) maintain this is not enough. Departments must invest in true inclusivity. The authors offer suggestions for ways to identify and address barriers to women’s success.

Conversations surrounding inclusion in the academy must also confront and embrace intersectionality. Najmah Thomas (2019) identifies another false neutrality: social equity service and scholarship, which is disproportionally taken on by underrepresented faculty members, are not valued as much as other types of research and service, making it more difficult for African American women scholars to succeed. In situating her analysis in the stories of African American women, Thomas emphasizes the importance of centering social justice in the practice and teaching of public affairs.

Students themselves have gender identities which influence their lived experiences. Stabile, Grant, and Salih (2019) investigate the role of gender in what students study. While there are gender differences in degree concentration choices, the differentiations are not always consistent with existing literature. Nevertheless, these gender differences raise concerns about their manifestation in the field and the frequency of women in leadership and higher-income public service positions.

In acknowledging the role of gender in public administration, we must accept that gender is not just a binary. Carol Chetkovich (2019) provides guidance on how to incorporate non-binary gender definitions into courses on gender and public policy, although her recommendations certainly apply to other courses as well. In highlighting the challenges of discussing non-binary gender when most literature defines gender as binary, Chetkovich reminds scholars of the interconnectedness of the classroom and academic scholarship.

To help make sense of these articles, Camilla Stivers (2019) provides a rejoiner to the AWPA symposium. She urges us not to accept the normal, but to create a new, better field of public administration.

Likewise, my hope is this symposium is just a starting part for a much broader conversation challenging the assumptions, values, and realities of public administration in the field and in academia. It is clear we are in need of new paradigms. To be public servants and to train them, we must work towards addressing the needs of all the public, just not a traditional, neutral, apolitical, male, white, heterosexual view of the public. These conversations are never easy, but they are essential. The articles in this symposium give them a direction as well as an urgency. I hope they are as thought-provoking for you as they are for me.

This AWPA symposium could not have happened without the support of JPAE’s editors, Bruce McDonald and William Hatcher, all the scholars who submitted abstracts and articles, and the AWPA leadership in 2018 and 2019: Barbara Allen, Erin Borry, Gemma Carey, Leisha DeHart-Davis, Maria D’Agostino, Mary Feeney, Mila Gasco, Hillary Knepper, Jenny Morrison, Greta Nasi, Shannon Portillo, Jessica Sowa, Jessica Terman, and in particular Alicia Schatteman for her guidance in this process. Thank you all.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Megan E. Hatch

Megan E. Hatch is an Assistant Professor at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. Her research examines the causes and consequences of laws disproportionally affecting vulnerable populations.