Public Agencies, Gendered Organizations: The future of gender studies in public management

Abstract

Studying gendered norms, practices, and processes represents the future of research on gender in public management, not tracking numbers over time. Gendered norms are rules governing behaviour that are institutionalized in organizational practices and processes, and are produced and reproduced through repeated interpersonal interactions. Theories of gendered norms have been developed in sociology, but it must be public administrationists who refine them for public-sector organizations, because the government context is unique, and equity is the third pillar upon which public administration rests. We conclude with a discussion of research projects taking a gendered-organizations approach and propose topics for further inquiry.

Representative co-production: broadening the scope of the public service logic

“…The question is based on what characteristics group representation should be understood as, whether they should be based on gender (AbouAssi and An 2017), income level (Wright 2015), or ethnicity (Atkins, Fertig, and Wilkins 2014). As in the present article, the distinction between these characteristics is not clear and more attention should probably be placed on the intersection between these and other characteristics (Mastracci and Bowman 2015). However, the complexity of representation implies that representatives may not only represent a social group, but in fact also the wider public or simply themselves (Litva et al 2009).…”

Gender Politics in the Lobbying Profession

“…Inattention to the role of individual lobbyists in the policy-making process assumes a uniform experience in the lobbying profession regardless of lobbyists’ descriptive identities. Furthermore, this approach sheds little light on whether the lobbying industry perpetuates racial, gender, and class imbalances in society and politics, topics that draw significant attention in studies of the political institutions engaged by lobbyists, such as Congress or the bureaucracy (Dittmar, Sanbonmatsu, and Carroll 2018; Dolan 2000; Keiser et al 2002; Lazarus and Steigerwalt 2018; Mastracci and Bowman 2015; Meier and Nicholson-Crotty 2006; Swers 2002, 2013).…”

Local Authorities’ Policies for Disseminating Gender Equality. Evidence from Italy

“…Gender literature emerged in the 1970s, as a consequence of the feminist agenda, and it immediately pointed towards the inequities of male-dominated workplaces (Mastracci and Bowman, 2015) alongside gender stereotyping and the under-representation of women in their workplaces, professions and policy-making bodies (Lehman, 2012). Since the late 1980s, there has been an increasing interest in gender-related issues in managerial and economics literatures with researches about the presence of females on fi rms' boards of directors (Nielsen and Huse, 2010;Luckerath-Rovers, 2013) and about the benefi ts of women's work (Acker, 1992;Davies and Thomas, 2000).…”

“…Even if much of the gender literature focuses on the private sector (Mastracci and Bowman, 2015), public-sector organizations are more likely to disseminate gender strategies for achieving gender equality (Riccucci, 2009). According to Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) and to Davies and Thomas (2002), gender equality is linked to new public management in public-sector organizations, which rejects old-style bureaucracy, based mainly on a concept of hegemonic masculinity, and it believes in smart organizations, equal opportunity and family-friendly policies.…”