In the last two decades, many public sector agencies have instituted a wide array of ''managing diversity'' programs designed to remove barriers to the full participation of women and people of color. Meanwhile, agencies are also increasingly responding to pressure to develop measures to monitor performance of all of their programs. Yet there have been few efforts in place to measure the effectiveness of diversity management programs. This article argues that such an evaluation is essential, and offers a preliminary governmentwide estimation of the success federal agencies have had in breaking down these barriers. We found, for the most part, that there is little evidence that broad-based diversity programs, nor any of their programmatic components, have created a more equitable work environment for

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Considerable research has asked whether public sector employees have different values and respond to different incen tives than private sector employees Recently, Jim Perry developed a scale designed to measure this construct, which he calls "public service motivation " We examine the relationship between public service motivation and federal employ ees' attitudes and behavior by examining responses of nearly 10, 000 federal employees to a recent survey Even though the survey only contained a subset of Perry's scale, we found significant relationships between public service motivation and federal employees' job satisfaction, performance, intention to remain with the government, and support for the government's reinvention efforts

Using the Social Capital Benchmark Survey (SCBS) data sets, the authors conducted a multilevel comparative study of identity politics and political culture in the United States and 30 urban communities. Analysis showed that gender, race, class, and religion predict political ideology, electoral behavior, and political protest in the national sample. Replications in the community samples, however, revealed significant differences in the patterns of relationships among those variables. Some patterns deviated markedly from the national norm, particularly with respect to race as a predictor of political protest. Using an index of new political culture, the authors show that “place matters” as a contextual influence on the strength and direction of relationships between social identity (particularly race and religion) and political outcomes.

Using the results of a recent survey of federal employees across the country, this paper examines the causes and consequences of "subjective discrimination" in the federal bureaucracy. It begins with the premise that perceptions of discrimination can be just as harmful to women and their organizations as the existence of any "objective" barriers to their advancement. It explores the roots of two types of perceptions: that women in general face disparate treatment, and that a woman has personally experienced sex discrimination. Work-related experiences are the most important predictors of both types of perceptions, while working with more men than women increases the likelihood that women will believe women are discriminated against, and age plays a significant role in perceptions of personal discrimination. Moreover, subjective discrimination is found to have an impact on the career choices made by women. While such perceptions are positively related to the likelihood that a woman will apply for promotion within her agency, it is more likely that she will choose to leave her agency altogether.Considerable scholarly research has demonstrated that women face barriers as they attempt to advance into elite ranks, whether in politics or in the bureaucracy