Research

Diversity is an important facet of public administration, thus it is important to take stock and examine how the discipline has evolved in response to questions of representative democracy, social equity, and diversity. This article assesses the state-of-the-field by addressing the following question: How has research on diversity in the field of public administration progressed over time? Specifically, we seek to examine how the focus of diversity has transformed over time and the way the field has responded to half a century of legislation and policies aimed at both promoting equality and embracing difference. We utilize a conceptual content analysis approach to examine articles published on diversity in seven key public administration journals since 1940. The implications of this study are of great importance given that diversity in the workplace is a central issue for modern public management.

Amidst the backdrop of considerable citizen unrest in the U.S. stemming from perceived injustices within police-citizen interactions in recent years, many government leaders have relied on the use of body-worn cameras as a means of improving citizen relations. The promise of body-worn cameras is that they might improve officer and citizen behavior given the possibility of retrospective and independent determinations of the appropriateness of behaviors which occur within police-citizen encounters. While the emerging evaluation evidence of their usefulness have been generally promising, overall determinations remain incomplete. Using a partial randomized experimental design, this study evaluated the impact of a test pilot program of body-worn camera use by the Hallandale Beach, Florida Police Department in the U.S. to determine their impact on police officer behavior and perceptions. Findings revealed that officers with BWCs 1) relied on less intrusive methods to resolve incidents, 2) continued to be active rather than abstaining from community contact, and 3) officer perceptions of the usefulness of BWCs remained pessimistic. Implications for policy and future research are discussed. •Officers with BWCs relied on less intrusive methods to resolve incidents, namely fewer arrests and greater citations.•Officers continued to be active rather than abstaining from community contact.•Officer perceptions of the usefulness of BWCs remained pessimistic following BWC use.

The study of diversity in nonprofit organizations is at a nascent stage. Using a grounded theory process centering on the racial composition of Girl Scout troop members and volunteers, this study proposes a two-pronged theory of diversity in voluntary organizations. Building upon Adler and Kwon’s three aspects of social capital—opportunity, motivation, and ability—the study concludes that even when sufficient opportunity and mission-based motivation exists, social capital of the bridging type will likely be insufficient to sustain interactions among diverse members. To remedy this problem, the theory suggests that a voluntary organization can first rely upon the bonding type of social capital to increase representational diversity, then structure mission-relevant interactions among diverse members to create bridging social capital, and sustain pluralistic diversity. New directions for research and practice are also discussed, with the theory indicating that many nonprofits possess characteristics favoring the creation of bridging social capital.

Religious symbols, such as the hijab, are often deemed undesirable or banned in public employment. We test if clients’ perceptions and their performance are influenced by a hijab-wearing public servant, and further test if clients’ reflections on empathy or professionalism about the public servant mitigate potential negative effects. We preregistered and conducted a two-step 2 × 3 between-subjects experiment (n = 2,680; representative sample in Austria). We find no evidence that the wearing of a hijab by a public servant negatively influences clients’ perceptions, nor their performance during a public service process. The reflection answer with respect to professionalism or empathy, however, is related to clients’ performance: Clients’ positive reflection on public servants’ empathy or professionalism—independent of whether the public servant wears a hijab or not—positively relates to their performance in terms of task correctness. We discuss the relevance of these results regarding religious stereotyping and public employment policies.

Public Administration, the field’s oldest journal, is now 100 years old. Despite this centenary, it has only been relatively recently that scholars have examined questions of: (1) how diverse, equitable, and inclusive the field is; (2) how oppressive administrative structures marginalize groups; and (3) what principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mean globally. We seek to contribute to this conversation by reflecting on what is currently known about answers to these questions, especially from global perspectives. We do this by presenting five purposively selected vignettes, each on some dimension of DEI. We frame and analyze these vignettes using Gooden’s “name, blame, and claim” framework. Reflections are offered regarding how the field can better center and achieve DEI.

This chapter discusses the importance of moving diversity management’s use of cultural competency in the delivery of public programs and public agency services from the conceptual and unconnected to a legitimate theoretical framework and model. Specifically, this chapter calls for a new kind of public agency service professional who possesses explicit cultural competency awareness, knowledge, and skills to work with racial/ethnic and cultural/linguistic groups in public administration and in the public agency service delivery process. The chapter concludes by noting the need for a cultural competency model that would integrate and transform cultural awareness and cultural knowledge about individuals and groups into culturally specific skills, practices, standards, and policies to increase the quality and effectiveness of public agency services and programs.

General Description:
This paper describes the New Mexico Pay Equity Initiative, which wasinstituted by Governor Bill Richardson’s administration over a two year period (2009-2011). TheInitiative built on recommendations from an Equal Pay Task Force created by the New MexicoState legislature in 2003, and a subsequent task force created by the governor in 2008. Thepaper discusses the rationale, policies, methodology and outcomes of the initiative, highlightingit as one way to serve the goal of achieving pay equity as embodied in the Paycheck Fairness Actand the Fair Pay Act, and also to advance the goal of government accountability andtransparency. Implications for the future development and replication by other entities areincluded.
Women’s Bureau goals addressed
: 1) reflect upon and celebrate the accomplishments of publicpolicies related to women, and 2) highlight present day issues and future DOL policy prioritiesaround women’s rights and opportunities in the workplace.
Importance
: The New Mexico Pay Equity Initiative requiring gender pay equity reports of entities seeking contracts with the state is the only one of its kind in the country . It is asignificant effort, and took two years to implement following earlier task forces and sets of recommendations. It can serve as a template for other government entities is advancing payequity.

How can an ethical-analytical framework focused on social equity help illuminate the challenges faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth of color, particularly those who are homeless? The purpose of this article is to engage in just such an analysis of the complex analytical and ethical challenges presented by homelessness among LGBTQ youth. The authors take as our point of departure the premise that trans youth who are also visible minorities may be among the most marginal and most likely to experience homelessness and other threats to well-being. The authors argue that society needs to be concerned with the lives of diverse LGBTQ youth, and particularly those navigating multiple, intersecting forms of marginalization, including homelessness, because they present us with a limit situation that demands an ethical response.

An interpretive monopoly is a narrative that defines what one must believe or do to maintain status with an ingroup while simultaneously creating a disfavored outgroup. The oppression of gays and lesbians can easily be traced to dominant narratives that function as interpretive monopolies. Because of how gays and lesbians are marginalized by interpretive monopolies, this article looks not only at the narrative communities that support oppressive narratives, but at the institutions that sustain them. Functioning as homogeneous policy networks in America’s “deep red” states, these sustaining institutions have created a political climate in which some interpretive monopolies have become the law of the land. Based on this theoretical approach, a novel solution is proposed: an information communication technology that will facilitate the efficient functionality of expansive heterogeneous policy networks. In the process, a mechanism for changing the outcomes of Tea Party-dominated primary elections emerges as an unintentional by-product.

As a result of the current fiscal crisis, the US Federal Government is calling on non-profit organisations and communities across the country to contribute their service through volunteering. This study uses qualitative data retrieved from a purposive sample of New York City non-profit administrators to determine the challenges and benefits of volunteer involvement in US non-profit organisations during the economic downturn that began in 2008. Findings conclude that although US Federal Government initiatives, including $50 million of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act allocated to the strengthening communities fund provided non-profits the opportunity to draw
on an influx of a highly skilled pool of volunteers, many non-profits remain underfunded, understaffed and unequipped to make the most of those who are looking to serve.

This study conducts a systematic review of 98 peer-reviewed journal articles that empirically investigate the presence of the gender pay gap along with factors that espouse it in organizations. The purposes of this study are threefold. First, it aims to explore trends in recurring themes that surface as factors that engender the gender pay gap in the workforce. Second, based on identified themes, the review summarizes and compares the gender pay gap by sector. Finally, the study presents a discussion on how the public sector fairs out in closing the gender pay gap and factors that predict it.

This study examines women’s representation in public administration scholarship by analyzing the research method and the content of 618 articles published in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, and the Public Performance and Management Review from 2004 to 2013. Findings indicate that women publish less than men as solo, lead, and top 10 authors in these two journals. The study identifies men’s publishing acceptance of articles using predominantly quantitative methods and women’s publishing acceptance of articles using predominantly qualitative methods. Finally, this study finds that university affiliation may contribute to publishing in one or the other journal under research. This study is suggestive in nature and provides further evidence of the underrepresentation of women in public administration scholarship.

Transgender individuals make up a disproportionately high percentage of homeless youth. This is due to conflict with their family, harassment in schools, or negative interactions with child services. In addition to the typical needs of homeless youth, questions arise regarding housing, changing the youth’s name and gender, and access to healthcare. Analysis examines what protections and services subnational governments provide to homeless transgender youth as of 2016. The findings indicate that state and local governments provide most nondiscrimination protections for these youths, with local government outreach programs specializing services for homeless and transgender populations. It is more common for states not to have nondiscrimination policies for the lesbian; gay; bisexual; and transgender community. However, several states have extensive protections for transgender individuals to remove discriminatory practices that contribute to homelessness, such as in housing or foster care. Findings also show that more than 350 municipalities have policies that explicitly protect the transgender community. These policies typically ban discrimination in policy areas, like education and employment, but some local governments went beyond these basic protections to serve vulnerable populations better. Although few governments formally create policies to work with homeless and transgender populations, more than a quarter of governments offer testing and treatment for HIV.

While previous research has focused on measuring employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and establishing the need for
laws that protect against such discrimination, very little research has
evaluated the effectiveness of current nondiscrimination laws. This
exploratory research considers the addition of sexual orientation to
New York State’s Human Rights Law as it relates to employment. In an
effort to better understand the implementation and overall effectiveness of the law, attorneys in New York who specialize in employment
law were surveyed. The survey results, based on the responses of 34
attorneys, provide insights into how well the law has initially protected
individuals from discrimination, and how well it has provided redress
for claimants of employment discrimination. The initial results of the
research suggest that employees mostly seek redress for a hostile work
environment, that potential claimants are concerned with confidentiality and retaliation, and that more training for employees is needed
to combat employment discrimination based on sexual orientation

Confederate monuments conjure competing public sector values. Like many cities in the USA, Baltimore, Maryland had monuments honoring the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy”. Such monuments, usually constructed during periods of racial strife, typically feature prominent figures of the Confederacy, such as generals. Proponents of such monuments argue these monuments honor historical figures that shaped US history. Opponents assert monuments symbolize racist ideals and reinforce inequality, particularly for African Americans. Baltimore had four monuments until 2017. In the aftermath of two racially charged incidents following decades of social injustices, the Mayor of Baltimore, Catherine Pugh, ordered the monuments’ removal in August 2017. This case examines the details and rationale surrounding Pugh’s decision in the context of competing public sector values. The knowledge and skills gained from this case study can be applied to a range of public administration and policy issues involving social justice, administrative competencies, and leadership.

Recent studies of the theory of representative bureaucracy have focused on active representation, whereby administrators in public organizations work to advance the interests of particular groups, achieving policy outcomes that directly address the needs of those groups. The concept of administrative discretion is central to these studies, as an administrator must have the discretion to produce results that reflect the values and beliefs of these groups. While the presence of discretion is often implied in these studies, few have examined it explicitly. Using data from the Farmer’s Home Administration, we explore whether administrators who perceive themselves as having more discretion enact policy outcomes that are more representative of minority interests. The results strongly support the conclusion that administrators who perceive themselves as possessing significant discretion and who assume the role of minority representative in their agencies are more likely to enact policy outcomes that favor minority interests.

Public administration has an ethical problem with race and racism. Researchers find that race is a nervous area of government public administrators avoid confronting, resulting in their eschewing discretion and creating administrative evil. Administrative racism occurs when administrators rely on technical rationality to avoid making difficult decisions about race. The authors argue public administration curricula must prepare students to address the root causes of racism. There is a need for race-conscious pedagogy to prepare administrators to competently negotiate this nervous area of government. This article presents one model for public administration programs to better prepare students to respond to ethical dilemmas dealing with race and racism. Drawing on critical race in education, this essay presents a race-conscious public administration dialogue, links this dialogue to public management ethics, and specifies a classroom-tested antiracist pedagogy for public administration.

The goals of valuing social equity and using it as a guide in managing public programs arefirmly rooted in the Minnowbrook tradition. Although civil rights activists have long fought for equality, attendees at the Minnowbrook I conference in 1968 were among the first in thefield of public administration to directly confront societal inequities by asserting that publicadministrators should, in addition to valuing efficiency and effectiveness, stress the valuesocial equity in the management and distribution of public services. The field’s emphasis onsocial equity continued on through Minnowbrook II and was identified as a key concernduring the most recent Minnowbrook III conference. After briefly summarizing discussion onthis topic during Minnowbrook III, this article provides an agenda for advancing the field’scommitment to social equity. This agenda centers upon clarifying the conceptual para-meters of social equity, transforming the place of social equity in academic instruction, andbuilding upon existing themes and methodologies in social equity research. Last, predictionsfor the role of social equity at a future Minnowbrook IV conference are presented for further consideration.

This article argues that the integration of race-conscious dialogues in public administration programs will promote racial and social justice, as well as improve service delivery for a wide array of constituents. Scholars have acknowledged the challenges associated with incorporating racial justice into public sector practices. However, if racial divisions are to subside, academic and professional training programs need to purposefully include discussions of race, racism, and racial equity. This article concludes with a discussion of way to incorporate an antiracist pedagogy in public administration curriculum. This strategy can begin preparing future administrators to thoughtfully engage in difficult dialogues around topics of race and racism.

This article provides an assessment of the employment of women in STEM occupations in the U.S. federal government. Women are underrepresented in STEM fields in the U.S. federal service, but their levels of employment vary markedly between departments and agencies. Women also quit federal STEM jobs in disproportionately large numbers, compared with men, and compared with women in other professions, and they resign at varying rates depending on the department or agency. We examine the impact of the presence of women in STEM supervisory positions on these patterns using a two-staged instrumental variable model. Our findings suggest that larger proportions of women in supervisory positions in STEM fields may help to produce higher levels of employment of women, but the presence of women as STEM supervisors has no observable impact on the rate at which women quit STEM jobs.

This article takes a critical look at the actions of American public administrators affecting African Americans in inner cities in the mid-twentieth century. It compares these actions to those of British imperialist functionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that domestic American administrators and imperialist functionaries shared an ethos of serving expansion and capital, sometimes as a means to achieve what they deemed to be the public interest. They also shared the use of race as a weapon in their drive to suppress the masses of what they viewed as superfluous expendable subject races—imperialized natives by British administrators or African Americans by U.S. administrators. Using Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, this article traces the role of administrators in the alliance between mob and capital that resulted in the resegregation and dispossession of African-American communities in much of urban America. This article argues that the combination of racism and public administration was used to subjugate and control subject races in British imperialized territories and in urban America.

The American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) advances the science, art, and practice of public administration. The Society affirms its responsibility to develop the spirit of responsible professionalism within its membership and to increase awareness and commitment to ethical principles and standards among all those who work in public service in all sectors. To this end, we, the members of the Society, commit ourselves to uphold the following principles:

Advance the Public Interest. Promote the interests of the public and put service to the public above service to oneself.

Uphold the Constitution and the Law. Respect and support government constitutions and laws, while seeking to improve laws and policies to promote the public good.

Promote Democratic Participation. Inform the public and encourage active engagement in governance. Be open, transparent and responsive, and respect and assist all persons in their dealings with public organizations.

Strengthen Social Equity. Treat all persons with fairness, justice, and equality and respect individual differences, rights, and ­freedoms. Promote affirmative action and other initiatives to reduce unfairness, injustice, and inequality in society.

Fully Inform and Advise. Provide accurate, honest, comprehensive, and timely information and advice to elected and appointed officials and governing board members, and to staff members in your organization.

Demonstrate Personal Integrity. Adhere to the highest standards of conduct to inspire public confidence and trust in public service.

Promote Ethical Organizations. Strive to attain the highest standards of ethics, stewardship, and public service in organizations that serve the public.

Advance Professional Excellence. Strengthen personal capabilities to act competently and ethically and encourage the professional ­development of others.

As a stigmatized group, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) individuals are vulnerable to employment discrimination and receive little legal protection. They have had to cope with discrimination and engage in identity management to conceal their sexual identity. This study seeks to determine whether LGBT individuals, in anticipation of discrimination, have lower initial career expectations, espouse more altruistic work values, and make career choices based on those work values, when compared to heterosexual individuals. Using data from a large survey of postsecondary students, we found that LGBT individuals, after controlling for age, visible minority status, and major of study, reported lower salary expectations than heterosexual individuals. LGBT individuals were also more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to espouse “altruistic” work values and to indicate a career choice in the nonprofit sector. We suggest that “altruism” may be an important work value that is related to a career choice in the public and nonprofit sectors.

Sexual harassment was establised as a form of sex discrimination in institutions of higher educations (IHEs) under Title IX of the Education Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Since then, decades of victimization surveys beginning in the 1980s show that sexual misconduct continues to be a significant problem for IHEs. Estimates suggest that as many as 25 percent of college women experience a sexual assualt while in college, while as many as 34 percent experience attempted or completed unwanted kissing, sexual touching using physical force, threat of physical force, and/or verbal coercion during their college career. In this Viewpoint essay, the authors propose the Preventing and Addressing Sexual Misconduct Framework as a tool to assess and cultivate an organizational culture that is responsive to these concerning trends. Pulling from an interdisciplinary body of scholarship and the philosophy of the #MeToo movement, this tool is a starting place for the continued dialogue that is needed to more fully address sexual misconduct on college campuses.

Automation promises to reshape a variety of work contexts in the coming years and the public sector will not be immune. While technology broadly—and automation in particular—offers a range of potential benefits from standardization to operational efficiency to financial savings, the potential tradeoffs and ethical impacts should not be neglected. This article addresses potential implications of automation as they apply to the public-sector workforce and its expressed values. Using data on state and local government employee demographics and occupations, this article utilizes scholarly predictions to forecast the ways in which automation may impact the public workforce, including the sector’s commitment to equity goals such as equal employment opportunity and the cultivation of a diverse workforce. Based on this analysis, recommendations are offered for prioritizing these public service values in a swiftly changing context.

This article critically examines academic scholarship in the field of nonprofit studies that pertains to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and issues. We introduce the key tenets of queer theory, a critical theory which encourages questioning social constructs, to nonprofit studies as a lens through which to examine the nonprofit sector. Using a queer approach, we analyze the past research on LGBTQ issues along the continuums of whether the research subjects are active or passive participants, and whether the focus on LGBTQ issues is ancillary or central. We find a minority of articles, most written between 2015 and 2019, which position LGBTQ people as central and active participants in the research. We conclude by providing a research agenda for how queer theory can be applied to the nonprofit sector and argue that placing LGBTQ people and organizations as central constituencies in nonprofit research will facilitate social change.

Although social equity was brought to the table in the New Public Administration of the 1960s and named the fourth pillar of public administration by the National Academy of Public Administration near the turn of this century, it still struggles to find its place as an equal among the traditional public administration values of economy, efficiency, and effectiveness. The question to be addressed here is, “How do we elevate social equity to equal playing status with the other pillars of public administration?” In addressing this question, three key areas are examined: definitions, measures, and curriculum. By examining how we currently define, measure, and teach about the values of public administration, including social equity, this paper provides ideas for “imagining and improving the future” so that social equity becomes an equal among its peers and becomes a standard of practice as opposed to a stand of courage among public administrators and policy makers.

The advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have extended the applicability of citizen coproduction in government service delivery and have entailed transformative changes, especially at the city level. City governments around the globe increasingly rely on the private sector to set ICT-based urban innovations, like initiatives to involve citizens in the coproduction of smart mobility. Although there are many benefits of ICT-based coproduction, there is nevertheless the potential for tension between private companies and the government with whom they are cooperating. Those tensions are built on the differences in interests and values of private and public actors, and the way of realizing them, and they can compromise the vision and duty of the government. We, therefore, aim to understand the potential impact of private companies’ involvement on the expectations and perceptions of coproducing actors towards social-oriented and service-oriented public values. We conducted an exploratory in-depth case study of the smart bike-sharing system in one of the major cities in Flanders, Belgium. Data were collected through official documents and 27 semi-structured interviews with key coproducing actors. These data were then qualitatively analyzed using Nvivo software. Our exploratory case study indicated that the private actor upholds the realization of values such as efficiency, reliability, and ease of access by bringing in resources and expertise to coproduce smart mobility. However, certain social-oriented values like citizen empowerment and engagement, and (digital) inclusiveness are not part of the private partner’s vision. The study highlights the potential assets and risks for the realization of public values when dealing with conflicting interests between coproducing actors, and in this way considers a different angle on private companies’ involvement in the coproduction of public services.

Organizational justice, diversity, and inclusion are central tenets of social equity in public organizations. This study explores the effects of diversity management and inclusive leadership practices on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice. Drawing from FedScope and the 2019 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, we find that an increase in the number of women and Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) is not sufficient to improve employees’ perceptions towards organizational justice; rather, as workforce diversity increases, the perception of organizational justice decreases when the relationship is moderated by an active form of diversity management, such as an organization’s policies and programs to promote heterogeneous workgroups. The results suggest that as workplace diversity increases, inclusive leadership practices positively influence organizational justice. The findings also indicate that the impact of diversity and inclusion on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice differs by gender and race.

Organizational justice, diversity, and inclusion are central tenets of social equity in public organizations. This study explores the effects of diversity management and inclusive leadership practices on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice. Drawing from FedScope and the 2019 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, we find that an increase in the number of women and Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (BIPOC) is not sufficient to improve employees’ perceptions toward organizational justice; rather, as workforce diversity increases, the perception of organizational justice decreases when the relationship is moderated by an active form of diversity management, such as an organization’s policies and programs to promote heterogeneous workgroups. The results suggest that as workplace diversity increases, inclusive leadership practices positively influence organizational justice. The findings also indicate that the impact of diversity and inclusion on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice differs by gender and race.

he recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County is a landmark piece of case law that offers fundamental rights to LGBT persons. This essay reflects on how this case arrived at the Supreme Court and its implications for theory and praxis. The overall conclusion is that cautious optimism is warranted.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities within the workplace have recently gained greater attention as significant demographic categories. A key question that emerges from the limited scholarship on LGBT employment in the federal government is whether there is a distinction between the experiences of employees within federal security agencies, defined here as the five major agencies that provide civilian support to the defense and military structures of the United States, and employees of other federal agencies. Using data from the 2013 Employee Viewpoint Survey, this article addresses the following questions: How does sexual orientation and/or gender identity as self-reported in the 2013 EVS impact employee perceptions of personal safety and security, job satisfaction, and diversity issues, and how do these perceptions vary between employees of the major security agencies and other federal agencies? The article shows that across the federal government employees are reasonably satisfied with diversity issues in the workplace, with no appreciable difference between those in security and nonsecurity agencies. However, current programs and policies intended to foster and institutionalize diversity are viewed as ineffective and should be improved through new policies and programs.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities within the workplace have recently gained greater attention as significant demographic categories. A key question that emerges from the limited scholarship on LGBT employment in the federal government is whether there is a distinction between the experiences of employees within federal security agencies, defined here as the five major agencies that provide civilian support to the defense and military structures of the United States, and employees of other federal agencies. Using data from the 2013 Employee Viewpoint Survey, this article addresses the following questions: How does sexual orientation and/or gender identity as self-reported in the 2013 EVS impact employee perceptions of personal safety and security, job satisfaction, and diversity issues, and how do these perceptions vary between employees of the major security agencies and other federal agencies? The article shows that across the federal government employees are reasonably satisfied with diversity issues in the workplace, with no appreciable difference between those in security and nonsecurity agencies. However, current programs and policies intended to foster and institutionalize diversity are viewed as ineffective and should be improved through new policies and programs.

Equity issues persist in defining public sector women as in need of accommodation, including during times of child-rearing or caregiving. The authors argue instead that viewing the fullness of a woman’s existence should empower others to see broad life experiences as a benefit to be fostered. Public service organizations and the academy should build policies and systems that recognize this value and work to cultivate, rather than accommodate. While women have historically taken the turtle arpproach- that is, keep your head down…

Sexual harassment is a persistent problem in the workplace that warrants further attention in public administration research. Despite the fact that black women are one of the largest subpopulations in the military, most studies of sexual harassment treat women as a homogenous group, and results generally reflect the experiences of white women, given their overrepresentation in samples. Using data from a large-scale and representative survey of military members, we find that nearly one in five black women in the military (17.9%) experienced sexual harassment in 2018. Our findings further detail black women’s sexual harassment experiences and advance the discourse on the need to address sexual harassment in the workplace through an intersectional lens in order to design more inclusive prevention and response programs and policies. For example, inclusive programs should proactively account for the experiences of black women in the design and evaluation of prevention and response efforts.

This study examines how gender diversity on nonprofit boards relates to chief executive officer (CEO) compensation using data of 1,835 501(c)(3) organizations with the GuideStar Platinum Seal of Transparency. The analysis reveals a positive association between women’s representation on a governing board and female CEO compensation until women’s proportion reaches 82%. By contrast, there is a negative relationship between women’s representation on boards and male CEO compensation. Overall, the findings suggest that board gender diversity has distinctive implications for CEO compensation depending on CEO gender and that having more women on governing boards contributes to closing the gender pay gap for nonprofit executives. These findings can be applied to other dimensions of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity.

The digital divide persists; a quarter of the U.S. population is unconnected, left without Internet access at home. Yet volunteer recruitment is increasingly moving online to reach a broader audience. Despite widespread use, little is known about whether the lack of digital access has repercussions on connections offline in the community. We examine the influence of access on volunteering across four critical aspects—structure, time devoted, level of professionalization, and pathways to volunteering. We find home Internet access has an independent influence on volunteering even after controlling for socioeconomic status. Those with access are more likely to volunteer, formally and informally, and are more likely to become volunteers because they were asked. However, digitally unconnected volunteers devote more time. Nonprofit organizations and government agencies should be strategic and inclusive in their volunteer recruitment efforts to ensure they recruit qualified and dedicated volunteers rather than rely solely on digital recruitment strategies.

This article describes the past and present and projects the future of the relationship between theory and practice for both normative and descriptive budget theory. It argues that budgeters have underestimated the successes. The present and future of normative theory look gloomy without major fresh ideas because the world of budgeting has changed and many traditional reform ideas have out-lived their usefulness. Descriptive theory has traditionally been weaker, but it has improved in recent years and will probably do well in the near future.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century in cities across America, both men and women struggled for urban reform but in distinctively different ways. Adhering to gender roles of the time, men working for independent research bureaus sought to apply scientific and business practices to corrupt city governments, while women in the settlement house movement labored to improve the lives of the urban poor by testing new services and then getting governments to adopt them. Although the two intertwined at first, the contributions of these “settlement women” to the development of the administrative state have been largely lost as the new field of public administration evolved from the research bureaus and diverged from social work. Camilla Stivers now shows how public administration came to be dominated not just by science and business but also by masculinity, calling into question much that is taken for granted about the profession and creating an alternative vision of public service.

An unnoticed breakthrough has occurred over the past generation in American public administration. The top level of federal governance is no longer a man’s world. It is a woman’s world as well. Female leaders increasingly occupy top executive positions at the levels of presidency, cabinet and agency. This revolution, like other social upheavals of our time, has significant implications for shared power, deserved rights and effective governance.

A bureaucracy that is representative of the public it serves- passive representation- can result in both active participation and symbolic representation.

This article considers the role that bureaucratic discretion can play in expanding access to government resources and government legitimacy for same-sex couples during periods of policy ambiguity, and how efforts to shape the use of bureaucratic discretion can be used as moments of political activism by same-sex marriage advocates. Special attention is given to the heightened role of bureaucratic discretion in the context of policy ambiguity surrounding gay marriage in California, before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the historic Hollingsworth v. Perry case.

Understanding factors associated with burnout among HIV/AIDS volunteers has long-ranging implications for community organizations and prevention. Using a cross-sectional sample of Latino gay/bisexual men and transgender people (N = 309), we assess potential correlates of burnout identified by multiple theories, including factors associated with volunteering (experiences, motives) and contextual factors (stigma, sense of community). Reporting negative volunteering experiences was positively associated with burnout, while being motivated by personal HIV/AIDS experiences and having a greater sense of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people (GLBT) community was negatively related to burnout. The study highlights central challenges and opportunities to retain volunteers from marginalized communities.

Scholars who debate the cause of and solutions for the decline in civic engagement have suggested that Americans have increasingly withdrawn from community organizations, reducing their political activity such as voting and interest in the political world, and generally failing to place the common good over individual self-interest. Their analyses are steeped in a tradition that is largely gender blind and consequently ignores care work. We infuse feminist analyses of paid labor and citizenship, which emphasize the merits and burdens of care work, into the civic engagement debate. We argue that care work, predominantly performed by women, paradoxically limits, enhances, and even constitutes a vital form of civic activity. We call for a fuller slate of social policies that will both redistribute the burden of care work and reinvigorate civic engagement.

This study examines women’s managerial experiences in leadership roles and reflects on their career needs. Women’s career needs are understood by applying the Kaleidoscope Career Model (KCM), which is yet to be widely explored in public sector settings. The KCM recognizes the interplay of multiple experiences that shape the career development of women in the workforce. Using 21 in-depth interviews with women municipal government leaders in the United States, we find that while all three parameters of the KCM model are relevant for women public managers, the need for balance is overwhelmingly evident for women across all generations. Further, we demonstrate how the relationality of women public managers, and the interplay of personal and professional needs drive their career goals. The findings from this study are relevant to human resource development policies and practices that take generational differences into account.

In commemoration of Public Administration Review’s 82nd anniversary, PAR recognizes and honors the ASPA presidents and PAR editors in chief of the past and present.

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The dominant narrative about women’s progress in public administration focuses on identifying the obstacles to that progress and how to overcome them. But to make real progress toward gender equality and social justice, we must rethink our entire approach to research. Understanding the difference women make via narrative inquiry is a necessary change to the prevailing dialectic.

Human resource management (HRM) is a curricular component in public administration programs. HRM is primarily taught from a legal and/or organizational perspective, focusing less on the “human” aspect of the discipline. However, public HRM professionals often encounter “gray areas” of public administration with tensions between mechanistic (structured) and humanistic (organic) approaches to management. This chapter demonstrates how to use case studies for humanistic decision-making in HRM to integrate and foster social equity. A collection of realistic scenarios places students in an HRM manager role as they navigate situations that can occur in the workplace. The case scenarios encourage students to examine the environment, legal regulations, processes, and policies for compliance in the public sector, as well as factors related to social equity. Scenarios immerse students in the complexity of HRM and challenge them to make difficult decisions, from appropriate dress codes to fostering inclusion in the workplace.

An important research agenda in public administration is to investigate how formal and realized public policy influences the lives of marginalized social groups. Recently, reinvigorated research on administrative burden can make useful contributions to this line of inquiry. Using ethnographic research methods, this article analyzes administrative burden experienced by the Khawaja Sira—individuals culturally defined as neither men nor women—of Pakistan in getting a legal ID. In doing so, this article contributes to a better understanding of the role played by third parties, administrative behavior and social factors play in influencing the level of administrative burden and social inequity for genderqueer groups.

“Teaching about systemic racism and the myth of white supremacy to the next cadre of public administrators is critical as it supports students’ abilities to challenge dominant paradigms and center counternarratives; both serve a purpose in advancing toward a more just and equitable society. This paper offers insight into the development and implementation of course content – across two universities in two different sociopolitical contexts – that helps students define, examine, and apply social justice terms that advances training for public service. Exposure to such content challenges students to consider ways in which social, economic, and political factors influence life chances and allows students to better understand how power and privilege perpetuate status quo inequities for marginalized populations.”

Sex and gender are increasingly complex topics that prompt new policy and administrative responses within public agencies. As the federal workforce evolves, federal employment policy must accommodate the needs of employees who do not fit traditional sex/gender categories. One emerging area of policy targets transgender employees, particularly policy that guides the employer response throughout the transitioning process. This research seeks to answer the following questions: How can transitioning policy and implementation within federal agencies affect employees? and How should transitioning policy be crafted and implemented? This work addresses organizational behavior and management issues by presenting a successful case of a workplace transition. Interviews of an administrator guiding the transitioning process and one of the first federal employees to complete a transition while in a federal field office are conducted. Ultimately, this research explores challenges with emergent policy and suggests avenues for designing and enacting future transitioning policy.

Sex and gender are increasingly complex topics that prompt new policy and administrative responses within public agencies. As the federal workforce evolves, federal employment policy must accommodate the needs of employees who do not fit traditional sex/gender categories. One emerging area of policy targets transgender employees, particularly policy that guides the employer response throughout the transitioning process. This research seeks to answer the following questions: How can transitioning policy and implementation within federal agencies affect employees? and How should transitioning policy be crafted and implemented? This work addresses organizational behavior and management issues by presenting a successful case of a workplace transition. Interviews of an administrator guiding the transitioning process and one of the first federal employees to complete a transition while in a federal field office are conducted. Ultimately, this research explores challenges with emergent policy and suggests avenues for designing and enacting future transitioning policy.

This exploratory research paper discusses important issues in public policy and service delivery,
critical incidence analysis, and invisible communities. Using the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) community as a case study, I raise several questions about critical issues,
including: How does critical incident analysis fit into study of public policy and how do we
understand invisible communities in critical incident analysis, and what next steps are needed to
improve critical incidence analysis with regards to invisible communities? In order to improve our
understanding of these issues, I recommend a deeper study of social construction of target
populations, more systematic data gathering on invisible communities, and increased media
accountability and standards.

Teaching cultural competency is a two-way street. Instruction is more comprehensive when it raises awareness of cultural context. And students see relevancy when they learn how theories and principles relate to the context they know. Cultural context is especially obvious in nations colonized by cultures different from theirs. India provides a compelling example because it has a blended public service culture containing several parts tradition and several parts that fit uncomfortably with the nation’s psyche. This discussion uses public administration in India to demonstrate how cultural context shapes preferences for institutions and how it influences expectations for interpersonal dynamics when state meets street. After presenting the Indian scenario, suggestions are provided for how to incorporate cultural competency into the curriculum and how to spotlight it in a classroom exercise.

The conceptualization of social equity in public administration and emergency management has been subjective to the user of the term. While the vagueness of the concept provides fertile grounds for intellectual debate, the failure to arrive at a single and formal definition leads to confusion and an inability to measure it as a programmatic or policy goal. For emergency management, how scholars define social equity within research is profoundly important for assessing and making recommendations related to governmental practices that have social equity as its guiding principle. To address this detrimental definitional situation, this research analyzes 15 years of social equity peer-reviewed articles in highly ranked emergency management journals. This manuscript concludes with a proposed working definition of social equity, recommendations to measure the concept, and a discussion of its implications for future research and practice.

This teaching case focuses on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at a museum. At the beginning of 2021, the organization found itself in a crisis when more than 2,000 community members and 85 anonymous employees demanded the resignation of the museum’s President due to the language he defended in a job posting advocating for a job applicant to diversify audiences while “maintaining the traditional white core audience of the museum.” Students take on the role of an external consultant to assess DEI maturity at the museum. The case challenges students to propose implementation and impact metrics for a DEI action plan. The case facts provide a timely and relevant setting to discuss DEI challenges in not-for-profit organizations.

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In the 1970s, many viewed domestic violence as a private concern. Since then, every state has adopted a domestic violence coalition to address intimate partner violence (IPV) through government intervention. States vary, however, in the structure of the coalitions, participation in federal programs, and the comprehensiveness of IPV services offered. Using the theoretical lenses of policy diffusion and policy drift, this study assesses the development of IPV coalitions from 1976 to 2018, paying particular attention to institutional structures, intergovernmental resources, and strategic service priorities. We find evidence of policy drift and multidirectional policy diffusion in state IPV institutional structures, service delivery, federal program participation, and strategic priorities of these activities. Federal grant programs increase the likelihood of program emulation among states and may encourage innovation within existing institutional and policy structures for the development of comprehensive services and a preventive approach to IPV that best serve vulnerable groups.

Every profession has a common core of values and professional norms that help legitimize expertise and standardize behavior, which are both molded by and instilled through socialization and teaching in educational programs. Accreditation and professional associations help influence the transfer of these norms, including attention to not just what we are teaching, but also how we are teaching it, and what underlying messages we are communicating. We broaden that to also examine who is teaching by examining demographics, expertise, and disciplinary influences as a notable influence on the socialization process of professional norms and values. Our findings show that nonprofit graduate programs represent three main disciplinary influences. The professional expertise of faculty is even more wide-ranging and women account for a higher percentage of instructors than public administration degrees or across all academic disciplines. Efforts to infuse professional norms in nonprofit studies may be complicated by the lack of disciplinary home for the field and a corresponding variety of disciplinary backgrounds for assigned professors.

The theory of representative bureaucracy has provided an important yet limited framework for understanding exclusion in the public sector. This theoretical paper engages with critical approaches to argue for an expanded theory that centers social equity. Close attention to the relationship between the public and nonprofit sectors illuminates how public institutions protect and reproduce White, masculine space by shifting the burden of representation onto racially minoritized public administrators and community-based nonprofit organizations led by and for people of color. An expanded theory will (1) advance an understanding of both sectors as institutional spaces that protect Whiteness and impede full representation and (2) recognize the importance of the labor required to counter inequities and actively represent minoritized constituents.

This article explores how deliberation affects distributive justice for minority view participants in policy decisions made through collaborative governance. It also examines whether the quality of deliberation (i.e., willingness to accept opposing viewpoints) and quantity of deliberation (i.e., length of discussion) can be an effective tool for minority view participants to overcome power imbalances in such collective decision-making processes. I use agent-based modeling, a computer simulation experiment method, to examine interactions among participants in a collaborative governance arrangement. I develop a series of theoretical propositions based on the simulation results, which are robust to various changes in the parameters and assumptions of the model. First, both the quality and quantity of deliberation may enhance the decision acceptability of participants with minority views. Second, the quality of deliberation may be more effective at empowering underrepresented minority view participants than the quantity of deliberation. Third, the quantity of deliberation may better promote minority views than the quality of deliberation when minority view participants are overrepresented. These findings indicate that interpersonal justice in collaborative processes may enhance distributive justice for minority viewpoints in collaborative outputs, even when procedural justice in the design of collaboration is weakened by an underrepresentation of minority view participants. I conclude with suggestions for future research that can further improve the external validity of the theoretical propositions.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly on diversity, we begin by reviewing management research on diversity in nonprofits. The preponderance of this research focuses on demographic representation. While more contemporary approaches emphasize inclusion in decision making, even this approach falls significantly short because group categorization and identity have become increasingly complex and fluid. We ultimately explore a values approach to diversity, where the fact that people are inherently diverse is recognized and valued in all organizational activities. The final section of this introduction reviews articles included in the special issue. We conclude that the diversity concept must move well beyond a managerial approach to include broader social theories, giving deep consideration to concepts of identity, power dynamics and hidden interest conflicts in diversity efforts, and the ways that societal diversity affects the dynamics of volunteering and the structuring of nonprofit organizations.

The purpose of this article is to explore the link between diversity management in public organizations and employees’ affective commitment by testing hypotheses on the mediating roles of transformational leadership and inclusive organizational culture. By combining theories on human resource management and performance with theories on diversity and inclusiveness, a theoretical model is built explaining when and why diversity management should positively affect employees’ affective commitment. Survey data from a representative sample of 10,976 Dutch public sector employees were used in testing our hypotheses using structural equation modeling techniques. Results show that the effect of diversity management on employees’ affective commitment can partially be explained by its impact on the inclusiveness of the organizational culture. In addition, the impact is influenced through the transformational leadership shown by supervisors who can be considered as the implementers of diversity management and as agents in creating inclusiveness. The implications for future research and management practice are further discussed.

Public sector employers increasingly promote inclusive workplaces, but the impact of such policies on employees’ perceptions of employer attractiveness has rarely been studied. A deeper understanding of how inclusive workplaces relate to employer attractiveness, and how this relationship differs between employment sectors, may inform recruitment policies and retention management. This study tackles this issue and provides a large-scale analysis of an online employer review platform, covering more than 16,000 Germany-based organizations as rated and recommended (or not) by more than 715,000 current and former employees. More specifically, it builds on person–organization fit theory and analyzes how employee referrals are associated with ratings in three dimensions of inclusive workplaces (i.e., inclusion of women, elderly, and disabled). The results show that inclusive workplaces are positively and significantly related to employer attractiveness, both on aggregate and across the three dimensions. The overall relationship is stronger in the case of public employers when compared with private employers, while there are no sector differences in the relationship when comparing public and nonprofit employers. The findings suggest that inclusive workplaces are advantageous in terms of employer attractiveness, not just for the beneficiaries of such policies, but even more so in the public sector.

This article examines the influence of bureaucratic structure on a public employee’s sense of inclusion. We argue that bureaucratic structure influences inclusion by accentuating or minimizing status differences. To test this argument, we investigate three types of bureaucratic structure: centralization, hierarchy, and span of control, all expected to lower inclusion, and “green tape,” or effective organizational rules, expected to increase inclusion. To test these expectations, we use quantitative and qualitative survey data, as well as administrative data collected from the employees of 31 departments in a county government in the Southeastern United States. Findings indicate that higher centralization and wider span of control reduce inclusion, whereas green tape increases inclusion. Hierarchy shows no statistically significant inclusion effect. The article concludes with the implications of these results of public sector organizational design.

Gender diversity in leadership positions may not always bring desirable outcomes for an organization as diversity researchers have argued. Female leaders are less likely to contribute to effectiveness of their organization when it is male-dominated and has strong masculine culture. We tested a nonlinear relationship between gender diversity at the top and organizational performance and the moderating effect of a female critical mass in an organization. Time-series data were collected from state-owned enterprises and quasi-governmental organizations affiliated with the Korean government and were analyzed through fixed-effects panel regressions. The results show that gender diversity on executive boards has an inverted U-shaped relationship with organizational performance. The positive effect of gender diversity on executive boards on organizational performance increases up to a certain level, beyond which the diversity effect turns negative. Curvilinear relationships were found to be flatter in more gender-balanced organizational settings, suggesting that the negative effect of gender diversity at the top is likely to increase to a lesser extent than in male-skewed settings.

Emotional labor refers to the management and regulation of emotions as part of one’s professional role. This research is one of the first to provide insight into the role of emotional labor during a global pandemic for Master of Public Administration (MPA) Program directors. Our paper both replicates and extends previous work in emotional labor through examining survey data from 92 MPA Directors. Using emotional labor as our descriptive framework, the findings suggest gender and academic rank indicate whose workload has been affected during the coronavirus pandemic. Furthermore, the results indicate the likelihood of greater burdens experienced by women, both white women and women of color. Our findings offer additional understanding about how emotional labor continues to impact certain populations within our public administration and policy discipline, sounding the alarm for MPA programs to address the problems at hand.

Employee performance management (PM) can benefit employees, organizations, and wider stakeholders, but it is often done poorly, and public administrations pose contextual constraints to doing it well. It has inherent tensions between the goal of accountability and development, is complex, and requires alignment across both a formal administrative level and an informal psychosocial level. In public administration, three contextual factors add complexity and difficulty—competing goals, red tape and public service motivation. This study examines how line managers—a neglected group in PM studies—“do” performance management in practice. Data were collected via interviews with public sector managers in the “new public management” influenced New Zealand public sector. Competing goals and red tape make PM difficult, offer little accountability, and inhibit employee development, which often must run parallel to formal practices. They also limit managerial skill development. Failings in one practice, such as setting employee goals, impact subsequent formal and informal practices. Public service motivation provides workarounds. To work well, modern performance management could be reconstrued less as a compliance activity and more as a psychosocial process reinforced by a formal, prescribed organization system. Practical insights into barriers and opportunities, to improve performance management, are identified.

The purpose of this study is to understand feminist empowerment through the grant-making and other work of U.S. women’s foundations and funds to determine how they incorporate and facilitate empowerment. This study contributes new knowledge on the connections between feminist empowerment theories and the organizational practices of women’s philanthropic organizations. To assess the ways in which empowerment manifests in the work of these organizations, feminist empowerment literature was examined along with development literature on women’s empowerment, and critiques of empowerment. For this study, a database was created of more than 200 foundations and funds in 43 states by using website and IRS data and a survey administered. The findings speak to the ways in which women’s foundations and funds align with empowerment theories and the areas of disconnect.

In this essay, we argue that orthodox theory—mainstream knowledge deemed legitimate and universal—in fact originates from a
very specific time and place, from a very specific type of individual. The archetypical orthodox theorist is a White, Western European Christian man from the Enlightenment period. Epistemic silencing universalizes his views as “modern thought” without considering the actual narrowness of its origins. We define and discuss epistemic racism and sexism and end with ideas about how scholars and practitioners can employ practices to dismantle knowledge hierarchies. We take as given the epistemic silencing that Candler, Azevedo, and Albernaz (2010) reveal in public administration research and argue that theory still has an important role to continue exposing epistemic silencing. This represents the ongoing and unfinished business of theory: To continue exploring insights from across the social sciences to inform and illuminate public administration’s path.

The public sector prides itself on being a place where women and other marginalized groups can find shelter from workplace discrimination. Still, gender inequities are evident in the public sector workforce. In this article, interview data from city managers and police officers highlight the gendered internal organizational processes, arrangements, and interactions that impact women’s experiences in male‐dominated roles. Despite seemingly equal opportunities to access and engagement in these bureaucratic roles, the findings suggest that women constantly face gendered barriers and boundaries that directly impact their experiences on the job and their work‐related outcomes. Legislative and administrative remedies are not sufficient to eliminate gendered experiences of women in male‐dominated roles. Rather, a cultural change from within the workplace is vital to realize the efforts of civil rights laws established more than 50 years ago.

The public sector prides itself on being a place where women and other marginalized groups can find shelter from workplace discrimination. Still, gender inequities are evident in the public sector workforce. In this article, interview data from city managers and police officers highlight the gendered internal organizational processes, arrangements, and interactions that impact women’s experiences in male‐dominated roles. Despite seemingly equal opportunities to access and engagement in these bureaucratic roles, the findings suggest that women constantly face gendered barriers and boundaries that directly impact their experiences on the job and their work‐related outcomes. Legislative and administrative remedies are not sufficient to eliminate gendered experiences of women in male‐dominated roles. Rather, a cultural change from within the workplace is vital to realize the efforts of civil rights laws established more than 50 years ago.

The public sector prides itself on being a place where women and other marginalized groups can find shelter from workplace discrimination. Still, gender inequities are evident in the public sector workforce. In this article, interview data from city managers and police officers highlight the gendered internal organizational processes, arrangements, and interactions that impact women’s experiences in male‐dominated roles. Despite seemingly equal opportunities to access and engagement in these bureaucratic roles, the findings suggest that women constantly face gendered barriers and boundaries that directly impact their experiences on the job and their work‐related outcomes. Legislative and administrative remedies are not sufficient to eliminate gendered experiences of women in male‐dominated roles. Rather, a cultural change from within the workplace is vital to realize the efforts of civil rights laws established more than 50 years ago.

The issue of faculty sexual misconduct is pervasive within academia, and more specifically, our public affairs graduate programs. At least 13% of women in academia experience sexual harassment by a faculty member. For too long, we have relied upon an underground network of individuals who work behind the scenes to protect our students. In this statement to the discipline of public affairs, we call out the institutional designs that permit complicity. An unbalanced student-professor power dynamic, exploited student vulnerabilities, and a lack of effective checks and balances nurture an environment that lets misconduct proliferate. Perpetrators are shielded by institutional protections and loopholes designed to protect universities from liability. In this call to action, we employ the social ecological framework to define achievable steps for confronting sexual misconduct at all levels of our academic system. Finally, we unequivocally demand action, now.

Routine, manual, or blue-collar workers play a substantial role in delivering public services, especially at the local level. Despite their prevalence, scholars know little about the specifics of managing these human resources. This contribution challenges common stereotypes about blue-collar workers and argue a truly inclusive knowledge base on public-sector human resource management (HRM) must include these workers. Building upon the job characteristics model and the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity (AMO) model of HRM that links ability-, motivation-, and opportunity- HRM practices to job performance, a research agenda is put forward aiming to better understand blue-collar workers in government. Researchers are challenged to study blue-collar workers in government to truly construct both inclusive workplaces and an inclusive knowledge base in public personnel or public HRM research.

Inclusion remains a very real and legitimate concern in contemporary workplaces. This research examines how executive orders from the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations influenced Biden era Federal Executive Departments’ strategic plans. This study analyzed the interpretation and understanding of departments’ prioritization and articulation of inclusion across seven core functional areas: (a) leadership; (b) policies, practices, and procedures; (c) human resource management; (d) culture, climate, and norms; (e) emotion, engagement, and perceptions; (f) training and professional development; and (g) accountability and sustainability. The findings reveal that inclusion cannot be mandated or rubberstamped. Inclusion is a subjective endeavor that can result in multiple realities as different employees can experience/observe the same event differently, sometimes infinitely so. The seven core functional areas offer a pathway to embedding inclusive practices and initiatives in the workplace. They create a common approach the federal government can undertake, prioritizing broader knowledge and fundamental awareness of the intertwined nature of experiences, perceptions, emotions, and reasons to foster a sense of belonging.

Western democracies are experiencing a widespread shift towards greater recognition of transgender rights in public policy, yet the timing of change differs across states. To explain this variation, I present a novel theoretical framework called “policy momentum.” Unlike existing work on policy diffusion, which typically emphasizes domestic or international processes, I theorize how the combined pressure from each level creates the conditions for policy change to occur. Empirically, I contrast the creation of national human rights policies to protect transgender individuals in Canada (2017) and Australia (2013). Using process-tracing and within-case analyses, and drawing on elite interviews, primary documents, and Hansard records, I demonstrate the decisive interaction of subnational legislative changes with an emerging global norm to produce transgender policy change. This paper thus contributes to our understanding of LGBTQ+ public policy while also providing a framework for explaining the conditions for cross-national policy change more broadly.

The vocabulary of governance has yet to come to terms with hermeneutic processes. This article explores the emergence and transformation in governance of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River using an interpretive approach based on philosophical hermeneutics. Drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutic concepts of tradition, authority, and prejudice, this research reveals how hermeneutic space is created in dialogue, deliberations, and collaborative work. This more fluid understanding for the governance process has key ramifications for public administration research and practice in terms of an ontological understanding of governance, rethinking of the practice of administrative skills, and shifting the manner in which authority is understood and exercised.

In 2019, American workers reported 26,221 claims of workplace harassment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nearly half of those claims represented sex‐based harassment. The #MeToo movement has shined a spotlight on the pervasiveness of harassment across sectors and institutions. A 2018 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine indicates that 58 percent of women in academic institutions, for instance, have experienced some form of sexual harassment. In this article, the authors propose a three‐part framework to establish a culture of zero tolerance of sexual harassment. The framework helps academic and other institutions prevent sexual harassment, protect victims from risks of reporting harassment, and set accountability measures to demand justice. The utility of the framework is twofold. First, administrators can apply it as a tool to audit institutional attitudes toward sexual harassment. Second, leaders can apply it as a corrective tool to prevent permissive organizational climates that allow sexual harassment to be perpetuated.

In 2019, American workers reported 26,221 claims of workplace harassment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nearly half of those claims represented sex‐based harassment. The #MeToo movement has shined a spotlight on the pervasiveness of harassment across sectors and institutions. A 2018 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine indicates that 58 percent of women in academic institutions, for instance, have experienced some form of sexual harassment. In this article, the authors propose a three‐part framework to establish a culture of zero tolerance of sexual harassment. The framework helps academic and other institutions prevent sexual harassment, protect victims from risks of reporting harassment, and set accountability measures to demand justice. The utility of the framework is twofold. First, administrators can apply it as a tool to audit institutional attitudes toward sexual harassment. Second, leaders can apply it as a corrective tool to prevent permissive organizational climates that allow sexual harassment to be perpetuated.

This research explores the experience of female police officers in the Metropolitan Police of Buenos Aires, which began providing public safety in 2010. The purpose of this research is to better understand the barriers and opportunities female officers are encountering in this new context of community policing in Latin America. With better understanding, law enforcement officials will be better equipped to ensure that female officers achieve at the highest levels in organizations. Responding female officers identified civic duty as a primary reason for joining the force. Female officers did not report significant levels of institutional discrimination but did report informal disparaging treatment, including sexual harassment. The results of this research suggest that as this young police force matures, officials should pay close attention to the emerging culture of the organization, as many common and negative aspects of it have already started to form.

Does unethical leader behaviour produce gendered responses? We study follower response to unethical leader behaviours of bribery and workplace harassment. Our findings, based on an experiment, suggest that leader gender, gender congruence, and implicit gender biases influence follower responses to unethical leader behaviour. These findings raise the troubling implication that unethical male leaders will remain entrenched in positions of power.

To date, most charitable giving research assumes that all households are heterosexual and that couples make giving decisions from joint financial resources. This study examines household financial management and charitable decision making among a purposeful sample of 19 gay and lesbian couples. Semistructured joint interviews were conducted and analyzed using grounded theory techniques. The study finds that same-sex couples practice financial management systems that preserve independence (independent and partial-pooling systems), in contrast to different-sex couples, who favor joint management. These systems yield more accounts from which charitable giving can occur. Same-sex couples’ giving does not always follow the household’s financial management structure, and many couples give both jointly and separately. Finally, some same-sex couples use their giving as a way to give lesbian, gay, and bisexual people visibility and recognition as supporters of mainstream (non-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender]) organizations. Future research should consider both sexual orientation and financial management practices in understanding charitable behavior.

Flirting with Disaster is the first thorough examination of government successes and failures in responding to natural disaster situations. The author contrasts the bureaucratic principles that dominate governmental activity with the disruptive effects of disaster and the forms of human behavior that emerge during disaster situations. By comparing case studies of Hurricane Hugo, Hurricane Andrew, the Loma Prieta earthquake, and the 1990 floods in South Carolina, the author is able to identify the factors that contribute to effective response to disasters and the conditions under which relatively minor crises may lead to system breakdown. The book looks at an extremely important but previously unexamined area of public administration and public policy; presents a general theory of governmental performance in natural disaster situations; identifies factors contributing to government success or failure in coping with disasters; offers fresh insights into how the government can improve its response in disaster situations; and integrates insights from emergency management studies, agenda-building research, and the study of collective behavior.

Bipartisan governmental representatives and the public support investment in health care, housing, education, and nutrition programs, plus resources for people leaving prison and jail (Halpin, 2018; Johnson & Beletsky, 2020; USCCR, 2019). The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 banned people with felony drug convictions from receiving food stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Food insecurity, recidivism, and poor mental and physical health outcomes are associated with such bans. Several states have overturned SNAP benefit bans, yet individuals with criminal convictions are still denied benefits due to eligibility criteria modifications. COVID‐19 has impaired lower‐income, food‐insecure communities, which disproportionately absorb people released from prison and jail. Reentry support is sorely lacking.

As public administration is faced with the challenge of making governance work, the university is being called upon to become more involved in the civic engagement movement. Increasing civic engagement requires addressing one of the core problems contributing to its decline: deteriorating community caused by a lack of social capital. Although there is debate about whether there has been a decline in civic engagement or simply a change in the ways citizens participate, there is agreement about the need to increase engagement and to include universities in this process. One of the proposed solutions, advocated by Barber and Battistoni (1993) and Putnam (2000), is service learning.

Empirical data support a positive association between service learning and social capital (D’Agostino, 2006). This paper moves beyond theory to describe actual collaboration between universities and public administration to foster a civically engaged society. I will first show that the university is a key actor in community. I will then describe service learning as the means for universities to fulfill their role in community. This is followed by articulating how, through master of public administration (MPA) programs, the university can move this conversation forward. This effort by universities is then assessed through a survey of 133 MPA chairs.

Fundraising is a mission‐critical area for nonprofit organizations and has emerged as a professional field in the past 50 years. This paper explores the gendered nature of fundraising work and its feminization as a profession over time, while simultaneously documenting the persistence of a gender pay gap and male over-representation in senior‐level positions in both North America and in the UK. The application of gender theory reveals that fundraising roles and responsibilities rely on key relationship‐building and organizational tasks, which are commonly associated with stereotypical women’s work and are, thus, valued less in a patriarchal society. As a result, the devaluing of fundraising as mission‐critical work, and a career suitable for both women and men, may limit the credibility and power of the nonprofit sector to represent diverse voices and enhance democratic values in society. The article concludes with recommendations for research and practice.

In a number of respects, the voluntary response of New York City’s sizable gay community to AIDS, through Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), has been unique. In addition to its important advocacy and service-providing functions, the work of GMHC assumed significant political dimensions that served to counter discrimination, empower the organization’s adherents, and help preserve their sense of community in the face of a medical and social catastrophe.

An introductory chapter includes a case study of how two lesbian police officers assisted in the investigation of the murder of a gay, hearing-impaired college student. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the relevant literature, including background information on discrimination against gay and lesbian individuals in public employment, the ways in which sexual minorities manage disclosure in the workplace, the recent history of lesbian and gay people in policing, and the development of shared perceptions by gay and lesbian officers about their work environment. This chapter also discusses how organizational effectiveness can be compromised when police agencies resist diversification that includes the hiring of gay and lesbian officers. Chapter 3 addresses community policing, which promotes interactive police and community strategies and resources that proactively promote public safety. This policing philosophy has led law enforcement agencies to face diversity in the communities they serve, which has led to recognition of the importance of recruiting gay and lesbian people into police service. Chapter 4 considers the experiences and shared perceptions of lesbian and gay officers in the United States and the United Kingdom, followed by a chapter that discusses the ways in which lesbian and gay officers have brought a unique dimension to law enforcement. Chapter 6 highlights two case studies – one in the United States and one in the United Kingdom – which show the distinctive and specialized contributions of gay and lesbian officers to policing. Chapter 7 explores the role of professional police associations in helping to diversify police personnel. The two remaining chapters focus on improvements in recruiting and retaining lesbian and gay officers; and best practices are recommended based on research conducted for this book. Tables, figures, references and a subject index

How does a social movement develop among a segment of the American population labeled deviant and criminal? How does such a movement attempt to change the laws, procedures, attitudes and practices of a western “liberal” nation so that the deviants are no longer handled by the agents of the state but are regarded as legitimate, tolerated citizens who simply have a different life style? This paper explores these questions through an analysis of the gay liberation movement as it developed in the United States after 1950.

Representative bureaucracy theory is instructive for dealing with the challenges that gender brings to governance. This chapter situates power structures within masculinist norms and explains why this is inadequate. Arguing that gender exists on a continuum rather than being binary, the authors apply representative bureaucracy norms to all locations on the continuum and provides a glossary of terms. Explaining how all categories of gender deserve representation, critical mass theory is used to explain how tipping points vary per category. Conscientious representation is offered as a means to reach the tipping point. The chapter concludes with the argument that to achieve greater integration of everyone’s point of view is to come closer to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Sex and gender are evolving identity categories with emergent public policy and administration needs. To respond to the diverse landscape of sex and gender issues in the public sector, greater competency is needed. This research will contribute to the body of work on sex and gender in public administration by asking the following questions: (a) what do graduate students in Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs know about gender competency, (b) have graduate students learned gender competency in their MPA coursework, and (c) how can gender competency in MPA education be further developed and promoted? This study provides a critical analysis of one MPA program, at John Jay College, City University of New York, to begin this line of research. Our e-survey results of a non-random sample of John Jay MPA students demonstrate that many students do not learn about gender competency through their MPA education and that gender competency skills otherwise obtained are limited. To address this, we emphasize the need for incorporating gender competency into MPA education as the first step in equipping future practitioners with skills to promote gender competency in public policy, administrative decision making, and workplace culture. We provide practical means of achieving greater gender competency in MPA curricula and programming and articulate the importance of expanding this research to other MPA programs, MPA faculty and directors, and geographic regions.

Sex and gender are evolving identity categories with emergent public policy and administration needs. To respond to the diverse landscape of sex and gender issues in the public sector, greater competency is needed. This research will contribute to the body of work on sex and gender in public administration by asking the following questions: (a) what do graduate students in Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs know about gender competency, (b) have graduate students learned gender competency in their MPA coursework, and (c) how can gender competency in MPA education be further developed and promoted? This study provides a critical analysis of one MPA program, at John Jay College, City University of New York, to begin this line of research. Our e-survey results of a non-random sample of John Jay MPA students demonstrate that many students do not learn about gender competency through their MPA education and that gender competency skills otherwise obtained are limited. To address this, we emphasize the need for incorporating gender competency into MPA education as the first step in equipping future practitioners with skills to promote gender competency in public policy, administrative decision making, and workplace culture. We provide practical means of achieving greater gender competency in MPA curricula and programming and articulate the importance of expanding this research to other MPA programs, MPA faculty and directors, and geographic regions.

A growing body of literature has documented leadership styles by gender. This study examines if directors of Master of Public Administration (MPA) programs accredited by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration exhibit gender differences in leadership styles. Such differences may affect the implementation of public administration and how effective MPA directors are in achieving positive outcomes. Using a mixed methods approach—specifically, exploratory sequential design utilizing qualitative data and analysis, followed by a quantitative survey—we find that there are some gendered differences among public administration directors. In particular, we find that women directors are significantly more likely than their male counterparts to exhibit traits that resemble transformational leaders. However, we also find that male and female directors converge in terms of other styles of leadership.

Does the merit-based selection process help to reduce gender discrimination in public administrations? To answer this question, we conducted an in-depth case study in Mexico and built two original databases for analysis. First, we measure vertical and horizontal discrimination, and second, we examine merit-based competitions for access to upper management levels of the Mexican public administration to explore their role in reproducing gender discrimination. We find the existence of both vertical and horizontal segregation, and the analysis of merit-based competition results shows that women have difficulty winning competitions for the highest hierarchical levels and traditionally male sectors. Based on these findings, we explore the role of merit-based competitions in reproducing gender discrimination. Finally, we urge for the inclusion of a gender perspective in public service reforms in Latin America.

This research explores the priorities of the gender equity commission in New York City over forty-five years. Archival commission data was organized thematically to understand the history of gender equity and suggest future possibilities for gender equity beyond New York City. In our historical analysis, we see an expansion of the definition of gender and an adoption of an intersectional approach to gender. We identify four historical gender priorities: sexual harassment and violence, pay equity and economic advancement, health and safety, and gender recognition and celebration. To address systemic issues of gender inequity, we recommend local level administrators embed an intersectional approach in their policies and programming and move away from the commission model to one of a permanent office or agency. These recommendations will better equip municipalities with the resources to increase gender equity, particularly during COVID-19 recovery.

This exploratory study questions whether Master of Public Administration programs prepare future public administrators to how gender plays out in negotiations that occur in organizations. Negotiated Order and Second-Generation Bias perspectives provide the theoretical basis to understand that negotiations in organizations may privilege masculine practices. In light of this gender leaning, the classroom is a necessary incubator for understanding gender differences in negotiation. Curricula and survey response data retrieved from NASPAA accredited MPA programs suggest that gender in negotiation is not being addressed in the MPA classroom. Public managers must negotiate for scarce organizational resources including salary, promotion, and other workplace capital. Recognizing that gender in negotiation remains hidden under the shadow of second-generation bias is the first step to the success of future public administrators. We must begin to educate our future public managers with a distinctive negotiation skillset as they navigate the 21st century workplace.

In an online virtual issue, we explore the history of gender and feminism since AJPA. It is clear that two major silences exist in public administration concerning gender. The first is the place of women and gender equity within public service workforces. The second silence is the role that feminist theories could play in tackling contemporary public management challenges. We argue that there are particular contributions that feminist theories could make in relation to topics such as collaboration, boundary-spanning and skill requirements for future public sector workers. In this editorial we therefore look backwards and forwards, examining how female public sector workers are defined within state bureaucracy, and what feminism can bring to the functioning of this bureaucracy in the future.

Voters evaluate politicians not just by what they say, but also how they say it, via facial displays of emotions and vocal pitch. Candidate characteristics can shape how leaders use – and how voters react to – nonverbal cues. Drawing on role congruity expectations, we focus on how gender shapes the use of and reactions to facial, voice, and textual communication in political debates. Using full-length debate videos from four German national elections (2005–2017) and a minor debate in 2017, we employ computer vision, machine learning, and text analysis to extract facial displays of emotion, vocal pitch, and speech sentiment. Consistent with our expectations, Angela Merkel expresses less anger and is less emotive than her male opponents. We combine second-by-second candidate emotions data with continuous responses recorded by live audiences. We find that voters punish Merkel for anger displays and reward her happiness and general emotional displays.

Forms of gender analysis are being introduced worldwide as new methods for achieving gender equality. This paper identifies limitations in dominant frameworks and puts forward suggestions to improve the process. It advances a form of deep evaluation to institutionalize conceptual analysis as a part of policy design. It also proposes the development of a Gendering Impact Assessment model that attends to the ways in which policy produces gender, and that has the potential to put in question the strategic norms of broad policy objectives.

This research aims to explore the factors influencing college students’ aspirations for careers in public service. More specifically, we examine how gender impacts public service sector preference, in terms of policy advocacy, government positions, and crime and policing as well as their likelihood to apply for such careers. Given a breadth of literature suggesting that women are averse to applying for competitive positions, we survey undergraduate students using mock-up job announcements with minimum qualifications greater than a bachelor’s degree. We find some differences in sector preferences and find that women were more likely to apply to public service positions upon graduation. Moreover, experiences related to leadership, coursework, family, qualifications, and learning behaviors influenced interest in specific careers and the likelihood of applying to careers in public service.

nspired by Hannah Arendt and several other philosophers, Governance in Dark Times is the first book to explore the philosophical and value underpinnings needed to guide public servants in these times. Featuring down-to-earth discussions of such issues as terrorism, torture, and homeland security, it suggests ways for people in government to think more deeply, judge more wisely, and act more meaningfully. Camilla Stivers argues that the most urgent requirement in dark times is re-kindling what Arendt called “the light of the public,” and offers practical steps for public servants to create spaces for citizen dialogue and engagement in public life. Ideas like “governance of the common ground” and “public service as social hope” will spark discussion and encourage renewed dedication to the work of governing.

A community’s health can be enhanced through access to healthy eating and active living which, in turn, can be supported through the built environment. While local and state governments have taken active steps toward promoting healthy communities, efforts of encouraging healthy eating and active living have not reached their full potential. The state of Mississippi is known as “the fattest state” in the United states and one of the factors that has led to such a classification is related to the way development occurs throughout the state. Drawing on a case study approach, the purpose of this study is to describe how local policy efforts can influence the potential for healthy eating and active living in the state of Mississippi. The paper examines the content of existing municipal comprehensive plans in terms of goals, objectives and policies related to healthy eating and active living over a 15-year time-frame (2000 – 2015).

Research in public administration examining the effects of diversity on public organizational performance has produced mixed results. However, the lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework has failed to provide an explanation for the mixed diversity effects. This study introduces a systematic analytical model, Categorization‐Elaboration Model (CEM), to help identify the contextual constructs which can promote the positive effects of diversity on public organizational performance. A meta‐analysis is conducted on 37 quantitative studies to test the empirical validity of a CEM constructed theoretical model with 253 effect sizes which will promote a better understanding of the circumstances or contexts that lead to the benefits of diversity within public sector organizations. The empirical results of meta‐regression point to the appropriate range of contextual factors which can alleviate the potential negative effects of diversity and promote its overall positive effects. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

A course on gender and public policy can introduce students to methods of policy analysis in the context of social-justice problems. Using a combination of empirical studies and analytic tools, students learn how social conditions and policies differentially affect women and men, and they can identify implications for gender equity. But our world includes non-binary gender types—transgender, genderqueer, and intersex people (some of whom are our students). How can an analysis built on strictly binary comparisons be reconfigured to include more gender diversity? The answers depend in part on how gender is conceptualized (is it a fixed, measurable dimension of identity or something socially constructed?). Exploring three conceptual approaches to gender, this article identifies three more inclusive teaching and research strategies: the expansion of gender types in quantitative analysis, the consideration of non-binary gender social roles, and the interrogation of binary inequalities assumed to be natural and inevitable.

This study examines the effectiveness of reentry programs as provided by the Second Chance Act of 2007 in reducing recidivism among ex-offender males in the southern states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Drawing on secondary data coming mainly from the
Bureau of Justice Statistics the study uses multivariate analysis to assess the factors that explain recidivism, and evaluate the impact of the Second Chance legislation on recidivism among young adult males in the three states. Findings indicate that imprisoned Black and
Hispanic males, as well as median household income are significant predictors of recidivism. Additionally, the study finds that, three years after its implementation, the Second Chance Act has achieved significant recidivism reduction among males in two of the
three states under study (Georgia and Mississippi), and it is, therefore, a promising legislation for decreasing criminal recidivism.

This paper examines how considerations of otherness and intersectionality could advance the theory of Social Construction and Policy Design. The paper utilizes housing policy and discrimination as its context to demonstrate how pluralistic sources of power and intersectional identities shape patterns of neighborhood segregation and lived experiences. While passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 marked a watershed moment, the administrative struggle to implement that law reflects the pervasive challenges of otherness particularly when current frames and constructions do not allow policymakers to consider certain populations that may be impacted or marginalized. The author investigates how government, private, and individual actions have normalized otherness, both responding to and reinforcing intersectional and complex conceptions of group identities over time. A more thorough examination of intersectionality and normalizing power can enhance the Social Construction lens to more authentically and truthfully empower action and present a path forward.

Sex and gender categories have become more fluid in recent years. With evolving understandings of sexual orientation and gender identity, public administrators are confronted with questions of how to craft policy and make decisions based on new conceptions of sex and gender for transgender employees. Policy and practice is especially challenging in the workplace where sex and gender encompass both personal and professional dimensions. Within the public sector, the federal government is recognized as a leader on these issues, and this work examines federal transgender policy to answer the following questions: 1) how are federal agencies addressing transgender issues in the workplace through formal policy? and 2) what can be done to improve future transgender policy? To gain a better understanding of what constitutes an effective transgender workplace policy, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of nine transgender plans from the following federal agencies: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Internal Revenue Service, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, United States Office of Special Counsel, United States Department of Interior, United States Department of Labor, United States Environmental Protection Agency, and United States Office of Personnel Management. Our analysis includes the identification of major themes within the nine policy documents. From this analysis, we propose best practices and future policy directions, as well as suggest ways of expanding the limited scholarship on transgender issues in the public sector.

We find ourselves once again in a state of war. A literal war churns in Eastern Europe—the materialization of imperialistic ambitions by an aggressive nation, or perhaps just the result of its communist dictator’s effort to cement himself in the history books. While not yet formally declared by nations beyond Russia and Ukraine, this war is being fought in the hearts of people the world over. We grieve for the innocents struggling to defend themselves against a larger and better-supplied aggressor. It is a true David and Goliath story, with one giant nation shattering the global status quo to pursue its evil ambitions. Nations large and small are rallying to oppose such action through economic, political, and social sanctions in hopes that global war might be avoided. They hope that such measures will dissuade the hungry bear from its gluttonous pursuits. I fear that bear will only be further empowered by such weak and indirect resistance, and once Ukraine has been consumed, its appetite will turn to other targets just as a bear acclimated to human society learns to return to the same campground for a snack. I also fear that our world will be more clearly divided as a result: East versus West, Capitalist versus Communist, and Democracy versus Autocracy. Opportunity-seeking dictators may view this disruption as a cue to act on their own imperialistic ambitions.

In the current context of public-sector workplaces, there is a more concerted effort to address identity and equity through greater inclusion. The aim of the special issue is to present emergent empirical research assessing organizational attributes, policy, and practice for achieving improved workplace inclusion and individual perceptions of inclusive public-sector workplaces. This special issue highlights studies that advance innovative methodologies to address emergent research questions related to understanding, implementing, and assessing inclusive cultures and perceptions of inclusion. The collection of articles advances the understanding and theories of inclusive practices, policies, and organizational attributes. The authors go beyond the rhetoric of inclusion to parse out how inclusion is defined and operationalized in organizations, the impact of inclusive initiatives, and areas of identity that need to be explicitly included. This research provides a pathway for intentionally making the case for inclusion, not just acknowledgment of diversity.

The federal government lags behind in progressive civil rights policies in regard to universal workplace antidiscrimination laws for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans. The slow progress matters to inclusionary workplace practices and the theory and practice of public administration generally, as recognition of LGBT rights and protection are constitutive of representative bureaucracy and promoting social equity. This study examines the turnover intention rates of self-identified LGBT employees in the U.S. federal government. Using the Office of Personnel Management’s inclusion quotient (IQ), and 2015 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), we identify links in the relationships between workplace inclusion and turnover outcomes among LGBT individuals. We also examine the impact of agency type on LGBT turnover rates based on Lowi’s agency classification type. Key findings suggest that LGBT employees express higher turnover intentions than those that identify as heterosexuals/straight, and LGBT employees who perceive their agencies as redistributive or communal are less likely to experience turnover intentions. However, an open and supportive workplace environment had a positive impact on turnover, suggesting that to implement effective structural change in an organization’s culture of inclusion, public sector managers must do more than merely “talk the talk.” This finding is also suggestive of LGBT employees’ desire to avoid the stigma of being LGBT and hide their identities. Institutions must heed the invisible and visible identities of their employees to be truly inclusive. Workplace practices that acknowledge the invisible and visible identities of their employees are a positive step toward real workplace inclusion.

Social Equity, Social Movement, LGBTQ+

In 1947 – the mid-point of the 20th Century – Harry S. Truman warned in a report of his Commission on Higher Education, “
If the ladder of educational opportunity rises high at the doors of some youth and scarcely rises at the doors of others, while at the same time formal education is made a prerequisite to occupational and social advance, then education may become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.”1 Now over 60 years later – well into the 21st century – these words read as an eerie foreshadowing to the state of higher education in the United States today.

It is often suggested that nonprofit organizations positively impact our local communities. Studies, however, have consistently shown that the distribution of these organizations varies considerably from one community to the next. These differences have led some scholars to begin raising serious concern about the degree of “charitable equity” across communities. Thus, the purpose of this study was to explore how the makeup of a community’s nonprofit sector affects the views of those who potentially depend on nonprofit services. Specifically, using data from a countywide survey of public attitudes toward nonprofits in southern California (N = 1,002), we examined whether differences in the distribution of nonprofits affected individuals’ confidence in nonprofit performance as well as their awareness of what nonprofit organizations even are. Findings indicated that nonprofit density was strongly related to awareness of the sector, while awareness was, in turn, strongly related to confidence in nonprofit performance.

Although the percentage of Blacks earning college degrees has nearly doubled over the past 20years, Blacks earn only 10% of college degrees, 12% of graduate degrees, and 7% of doctoral degrees (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013). Furthermore, Blacks are more likely to attend lower-quality institutions and less likely to graduate (Mettler, 2014). This translates into possibly fewer Black men completing degrees in public affairs education and seeking public service. If we are to secure a representative bureaucracy (Krislov, 2013; Naff, 2001) in which both public administrators and college faculty mirror the nation’s demographics, then we must ensure that Black males have equal access to an affordable, quality college education resulting in degree completion. In this article, we examine disparities in higher education along three procedural areas: (a) access, (b) affordability, and (c) attainment. We provide substantive policy recommendations toward ensuring both access and degree attainment for all individuals regardless of race or income.

Emotion is the “how” of NASPAA competencies related to leading and managing in a culturally-conscious manner. In this article, we describe the role of emotion in public service and we detail the mechanism by which emotion fosters a collective mind-set for effective public service leadership and cultural literacy. We indicate specifically where emotive competencies could be integrated into the foundational skills demanded of all graduates of accredited programs. We further argue that they should be integrated into MPA core curricula. This normative argument captures the ethics of emotional labor: To graduate students from MPA programs without emotive capacities is to leave them poorly equipped for the practice of public service and to do so would be unethical. To demonstrate what is possible in public affairs education, we turn to an example from the Government of India Civil Service Competency Dictionary for a framework of emotive competencies in human resource management.

This research adds to the emergent literature on intersectionality and public administration through examining how transgender women of color (trans WOC) are interacting with U.S. social welfare offices. It is our contention that trans WOC, facing a compounded set of negative stereotypes derived from racial and gender identities, will be more likely than other transgender identifying persons to: (1) avoid seeking out public welfare benefits and (2) be more likely to report experiencing discriminatory treatment in social welfare offices. Using data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey we uncover evidence that trans WOC are more likely to avoid social welfare offices and face discrimination in social welfare offices. Scholars and administrators of social welfare programs, including Social Security related benefits, should be aware of the potential for public benefit avoidance and administrative discrimination directed toward historically marginalized groups and prioritize social equity considerations among clients facing compounded intersectional barriers.

This research seeks adds to the emergent literature on intersectionality and public administration through examining how transgender women of color (trans WOC) are interacting with U.S. social welfare offices. It is our contention that trans WOC, facing a compounded set of negative stereotypes derived from racial and gender identities, will be more likely than other transgender identifying persons to: 1) avoid seeking out public welfare benefits, and 2) be more likely to report experiencing discriminatory treatment in social welfare offices. Using data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey we uncover evidence that trans WOC are more likely to avoid social welfare offices and face discrimination in social welfare offices. Scholars and administrators of social welfare programs, including Social Security related benefits, should be aware of the potential for public benefit avoidance and administrative discrimination directed toward historically marginalized groups, and prioritize social equity considerations among clients facing compounded intersectional barriers.

The United States is undergoing a trnasformation in perceptions of, and policies toward, sexual orientation. As of March 2013, 49 percent of adults support same-sex marriage, compared with 33 percent in 2003, representing one of the largest swings in public opinion in the past decade (PEW Research, 2013). These changes are apparent at all levels of society from the individual and family to local and national governments: however, fully conseptualizing the status and scope of such changes is challenging. One primary purpose of this paper is to introduce the Institutional (D) Evolution Farmework (IEF), which classifies social and governmental institutions as they move through states of being based on individual-level knowledge acquisition and reflection broadened from Sementelli’s map of the individual (2012). This framework acknowledges multiple levels of, and interactions betweem, government and social institutions and is generalizable to an array of issues. Our second purpose is to apply the IEF to assess the evolution in the institutions respective to issues of sexual orientation within the United States.

Sexual oreintation and governance in public administration

The #MeTook movement has done a great deal to address sexual abuse and violence. There is no doubt that justice may occur when the right person speaks out. However, what happens when the wrong people- that is, people of color, the working class women, and transgender people- speak out on the same issue? When these “wrong people” do speak out, they are discredited, marginalized, and silence by being ignored. This viewpoint essay addresses two populations that have been overlooked by the #MeToo movement: women of color and transgender people. The essay concludes with recommendations for how the movement can move forward given the criticisms around the absence of diversity and transparency.

A now well-established link exists between passive representation of racial and gender minorities in certain bureaucracies and substantive benefits for the represented groups. However, few quantitative studies have distinguished between the multiple possible mechanisms by which passive representation might produce such effects. We conduct a novel set of empirical analyses aimed at determining whether or not passive representation produces effects only for those clients who directly interact with bureaucrats who share their demographic characteristics or if passive representation produces broader organizational-level effects. We find strong evidence that minority clients’ outcomes are positively associated with representation in portions of the bureaucracy with which they do not directly interact. This suggests that either passive representation produces substantial bottom-up, organizational-level effects or that managers who recruit minority personnel also adopt policies that are favorable toward minority clients.

The research in representative bureaucracy that examines the extent to which racial congruence impacts bureaucrats’ decisions in mixed. This study adds to this literature by examining the impact of representative bureaucracy on the level of force that police officers use and whether they make an arrest in use of force encounters, while taking into consideration key situationsal conditions. Using individual-level data from New Orleans to estimate this imoact, the authors find that racial congruence and incongreunce impact policing outcomes even in the prescence of situational shortcuts theat cue decision-making. The findings show that benefits of representation are conditiional on the outcome.

Women are underrepresented in public sector leadership positions, including municipal management. We examine one explanation that may contribute to gender inequity in the profession – a “glass cliff” phenomenon whereby councils are more likely to hire women as managers during difficult times, increasing the likelihood for women to fail in the position. Using original observational data on municipal managers in Florida, we test whether municipalities are more likely to hire women during times of fiscal stress and whether women are more likely than men to leave the position if municipal finances do not improve. Our results show that increasing budget deficits are associated with municipalities hiring women as managers. Post-appointment, a lack of improvement in the deficit condition is associated with a higher probability of women, but not men, leaving the position. A glass cliff in municipal management could be one factor that hinders women from advancing within the field.

Transgender (trans) rights are human rights; however, human resource management (HRM) policies often do not consider implications for non-binary gender equity. Instead, trans employees often face adverse working conditions, including discrimination, harassment, and marginalization—a critical HRM issue. As the workforce diversifies, HRM professionals must increase their understanding of identity categories, such as sex and gender. Moreover, HRM professionals must be equipped to critically analyze and uphold or amend workplace policies and practices to protect the rights and address the unique challenges faced by non-gender binary employees. This teaching case study facilitates a discussion on transgender rights and the role of HRM by analyzing issues of access, fairness, safety, and inclusivity in the public sector workplace. Students are challenged to consider how different groups are affected by HRM policy (or lack thereof) and how to balance policies with the needs and safety concerns of various stakeholders.

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This study provides insight into the changing normative judgements of civil society organizations over time through the concept of legitimacy. A case study of an LGBT organization in Ireland over the past 40 years shows how a process of legitimation took place in five steps: refuge, advocacy, formalization, impact, and organizational survival. The initial stigmatization of the organization’s core purpose created opportunities for social capital to grow, which, ironically, helped to initiate the process of legitimation. In the end, pragmatic legitimacy waned after the organization achieved impact and was successful in its mission. This organizational perspective on civil society and on a history of LGBT rights contributes to understanding the legitimacy of civil society organizations, actors which influence change in normative judgements over time. Treating legitimacy as both a property and a process highlights how these organizations can be simultaneously subjects of normative judgement and also agents of change.

First responders, including police officers and firefighters, take on the occupational role of responding to community needs during emergencies. While it is acknowledged that their emergency role may change and adapt during large-scale crisis events, this is assumed to be a temporary change that will eventually result in a return to traditional occupational responsibilities. This may be different for public health emergencies, like the overdose crisis, that require a long-term and dynamic response. Moreover, recent policy shifts toward harm reduction policies over prosecution-focused policies may inadvertently change the traditional roles of first responders. Using 30 qualitative interviews with police officers and firefighters in Florida, this study examines how harm reduction policies can influence the occupational roles and responsibilities of first responders and reveals how agencies can mitigate the potential burdens associated with implementing these policy responses. This study found that first responder roles were generally expanding to meet growing community needs which included responding to overdoses. The overdose crisis placed additional burdens on first responders (especially police officers) but shared responsibilities between first response agencies and organizational service expansion could mitigate this burden.

LGBT homeless youth are a particularly vulnerable population, accounting for 20–40% of all homeless youth. Literature demonstrates that these youth are disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system. Involvement in the justice system frequently begins with a police contact, about which relatively little is understood. Fear of the police among LGBT homeless youth is likely common, and police may be ill-equipped to interact with and assist these youth, even when programs specific to improving police-LGBT relations are present. The present exploratory study examines how LGBT homeless youth and police interact by presenting findings from 18 interviews with formerly homeless LGBT youths (now adults), LGBT advocates, and police officers. Findings reveal that fear of the police and reports of discriminatory actions by police are common, LGBT youth have difficulty accessing services, and police often report being limited in how they can help this population.

Using a constructivist case study analysis, we explore philanthropy toward higher education among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) alumni, examining how a person’s LGBTQ identity and experiences (un)consciously affects his, her, or hir1 decision to give philanthropically. Data come from focus groups with 37 advancement staff and 23 LGBTQ alumni at two research extensive universities. Findings reveal unconscious influences of LGBTQ identities on giving, importance of campus climate for LGBTQ individuals, and LGBTQ alumni affinity group involvement. We draw implications from our findings, discussing the need to create a warm campus climate for current students, increase and encourage involvement within LGBTQ affinity groups, systematize data collection to include LGBTQ identities, and develop culturally sensitive solicitations.

This article identifies the extent to which deeply embedded ideas and beliefs about the innate normalcy of the man/woman gender binary feed longstanding attitudes against those persons whose gender identity is believed to be aberrant and pathological. The discrimination directed at LGBTQ + persons creates inequities that deepen their social marginalization and push them further away from the exercise of constitutional rights. This article urges public administration to create effective interventions to eliminate the racism and gender-identity hate and discrimination that continue to place an unfair burden on especially LGBTQ+ Black, Indigenous and other Persons of Color (BIPOC).

Current debates about bathrooms and bathroom policy contribute to a long history of how space shapes norms and expectations about privacy and gender equity in the workplace. The military serves as a significant site of discussion, particularly as the Department of Defense moves forward with efforts to integrate women into combat positions. Relying on an analysis of 27 focus groups with a total of 198 participants we collected from Special Operations in the U.S. Army, we examine bathrooms as a site where male soldiers contest and resist female integration. Using Sasson-Levy and Katz’s concept of institutional de-gendering and re-gendering, we argue that men’s resistance to gender-neutral toilets is an effort to re-gender Special Forces and maintain the hegemonic masculine culture that acutely defines it.

Examining minority-led nonprofit organizations provides an opportunity to promote cultural competency education within nonprofit specializations. This case study, which focuses on three African American-led nonprofits, serves as an educational resource to examine 1) leadership and mission, 2) program and service delivery, and 3) impacts and outcomes. Common characteristics across these organizations include strong ties to their respective communities, programs that embed cultural awareness, and positive outcomes among the youth served. This case study provides a resource to make African American-led organizations more visible in nonprofit and public affairs courses.

Diversity climate—shared employee perceptions of the extent to which an organization is inclusive and fair—is of increasing interest to public administration scholars. While research has linked diversity climate to a range of employee and organizational outcomes, less is known about how common managerial practices affect diversity climate. This article addresses this gap by examining three such practices: workplace voice, centralized decision-making, and teamwork. Each is theoretically expected to act upon both the inclusion and fairness dimensions of diversity climate. We test these expectations using regression analysis of departmental-level data collected through surveys of four North Carolina public organizations. The results suggest that workplace voice and teamwork enhance diversity climate, while centralized decision-making diminishes it in workplaces with mostly white employees. Practically speaking, the results imply that common management techniques that benefit public organizations also foster positive diversity climates.

What does it mean to be a successful working parent? And how do working parents cope in the United States, the only developed nation with no paid parental leave requirement? Despite some positive advancement in the voluntary adoption of paid parental leave, many organizations over the past 25 years have instead decreasedpaid leave benefits offered to employees in the US, choosing instead to let unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act serve in its place. This regression in practice is perhaps the greatest unintended consequence of FMLA, and surely was not the intent of Congress. Maternity Leave: Policy and Practice, Second Edition approaches parental leave from a variety of perspectives: legal, political, social, institutional, organizational, and most importantly, from the personal perspectives of the women and men interviewed expressly for the book.

What does it mean to be a successful working parent? And how do working parents cope in the United States, the only developed nation with no paid parental leave requirement? Despite some positive advancement in the voluntary adoption of paid parental leave, many organizations over the past 25 years have instead decreased paid leave benefits offered to employees in the United States, choosing instead to let unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) serve in its place. This regression in practice is perhaps the greatest unintended consequence of FMLA and surely was not the intent of Congress. Maternity Leave: Policy and Practice, Second Edition approaches parental leave from a variety of perspectives: legal, political, social, institutional, organizational, and, most importantly, from the personal perspectives of the women and men interviewed expressly for the book.

The nonprofit sector has become increasingly reliant on paid professional staff and now faces competition from the private and public sectors, which often pay higher to attract and retain workers. Although Millennials are attracted to nonprofit work, there are concerns that they will not remain committed to the nonprofit workforce due to low pay. We analyzed data from the 2011 Young Nonprofit Professionals Network Survey to examine the relationship between pay, perceptions of equitable pay, and sector-switching intentions among Millennial nonprofit workers. Although two thirds of the respondents indicate sector-switching intentions, we found no evidence that Millennial nonprofit workers, who are purported to value extrinsic and materialistic rewards, expressed sector-switching intentions on account of pay. However, pay influences the sector-switching intentions of Millennial nonprofit managers and those with advanced education. Our results suggest that the nonprofit sector may be facing challenges in attracting and retaining Millennial managers because of low pay.

What moral readings characterize contemporary U.S. Supreme Court opinions on discrimination by race; ethnicity; religion; gender; sexuality; and disabilities? John Rohr and the Constitutional School of Public Administration scholars have analyzed the Supreme Court’s decisions for moral insights in public affairs. The authors sought to take a modest step with analysis based on a more nuanced, empirical moral reading of the Court’s cases. First, the authors critiqued the case-study method of the Constitutional School, comparing these with moral readings of the Court’s opinion, including moral justifications that are teleological and nonteleological. Second, the authors analyzed selected opinions by the contemporary Supreme Court on discrimination by race; ethnicity; religion; gender; sexuality; and disabilities. Third, the authors analyzed patterns of teleological (utilitarian or virtue) and nonteleological (deontological) moral justifications and concluded the Supreme Court ordinarily uses ethical arguments, often teleological (utilitarian), with nonteleological (deontological) justifications in cases of perceived injustice. Virtue moral justifications are rare: only with a nonvirtuous litigant. Thus, the authors meld a more nuanced, empirical moral reading with the traditional case-study method of the Constitutional School of Public Administration, without assuming appeal to some universal moral faculty—instead deferring to each person in accepting or rejecting these moral justifications.

This article investigates front-line conditions within two sectors charged with the delivery of social welfare programs public bureaucracies and private contractors. I examine two traditions of public management that operate in these organizations and focus on how each tries to direct front-line action. Drawing upon ethnographic data, I discover a disjuncture between these management frameworks and day-to-day front-line operations. A body of social theory that posits that individuals both create and are constrained by social structures is used to understand these findings. The application of this theory both suggests that there is an ongoing social process not capitalized upon by existing management approaches and offers a new explanation for the persistence of certain management challenges in these sectors. The article concludes with a discussion of research propositions and management techniques that emerge from this inductive analysis.

This article offers a metaphorical image of U. S. municipalities as public relations (PR) and marketing firms. Cities are practicing many of the same promotional and image-generation techniques as private-sector PR firms use with a desire for the same ends—increased consumption of goods and services, which in this case come from cities and not from private-sector businesses. The image presented here is based on six tactics that public organizations use to sell themselves to diverse audience bases. The tactics include branding, media relations, in-house publications (three prevalent tactics), use of outside organizations and volunteers as PR tools, public art, and built environment via sustainability (three uncommon tactics). The article asserts that image generation in a city acting as a PR and marketing firm is a consequence of the market models of governance, bringing postmodern public administration critiques to fruition.

This study examines whether the race and ethnicity of the individual filing a police misconduct allegation in Chicago predicts whether the allegation was (1) sustained, (2) not sustained, (3) determined to be unfounded (not factual), or (4) whether the accused police officer was exonerated of any wrongdoing. Multinomial logistic regression results show that Black and Hispanic complainants are much less likely to have their allegations of police misconduct sustained. When compared to a sustained outcome, Black complainants are 4.7 times more likely to receive a not sustained outcome, 3.6 times more apt to receive an unfounded outcome, and 4.2 times more likely that their misconduct allegation will culminate in the exoneration of the police officer. Results also show that a Hispanic complainant is 1.6 times less apt to achieve a favorable outcome in his or her case alleging misconduct by a police officer. These findings suggest that more work still needs to be done to reduce racial disparity in the resolution of allegations of police misconduct in Chicago.

Existing research on the distributional impacts of nonprofits and philanthropy focuses on how different groups directly benefit from nonprofit service providers. Given the increasing roles nonprofits play in public service provision and urban governance, it is critical to examine how the nonprofit sector may influence the distribution of public services. Combining the literature from urban affairs and nonprofit studies, we propose a theoretical framework to articulate various pathways through which communities with a larger nonprofit sector may create favorable conditions for public services to be distributed to certain racial–ethnic groups. We further test this framework using a unique geospatial dataset of public park access by different racial–ethnic groups in 2,392 U.S. cities. Our findings indicate that communities with a higher density of park-supporting nonprofits generate better park access for all racial–ethnic groups. However, more benefits accrue to whites than to other racial–ethnic groups.

Publication patterns contribute to a cyclical pattern—what gets written influences what gets read, taught, cited, and pursued for further research. This study examined 30 years of scholarship in three leading nonprofit journals for trends in how women, men, and gender (WMG) are included in “front page” material (titles, abstracts, keywords). The study highlights promising improvements in the inclusion of women as both subject focus and scholars. While only a small portion of the front page sections listed attention to WMG, women are more likely to be an identified focus/finding than men, and WMG articles are more likely to have a woman first author. The research also found that WMG articles are more likely to be in three key areas: volunteering, fundraising, and board/governance. Attention to WMG in these areas is notable, but perhaps expected given historical nonprofit gender dynamics. Expansion of attention in other curricular areas would reinforce the importance of equity and inclusion values within nonprofit scholarship.

Ely and Meyerson’s gendered organizations framework reconceptualizes traditional gender differences defined by biology and lack of structural opportunities, to a complex set of social relations in the workplace. We apply this framework to second-generation gender bias to further understand impediments to women’s career progression in the public sector workplace. In-depth interviews of state-level administrators in U.S. public sector agencies indicate that “narratives” perpetuate second-generation gender bias that is deeply ingrained in organizational practices and policies, especially for women and women of color. This framework can be applied to future studies examining the gendered nature of organizations in different workplace settings. Moving beyond already identified barriers, this study offers a comprehensive framework to understand how second-generation gender bias is central to long-standing workplace inequities.

Multiple public administration survey research projects have asked respondents to assess the level of red tape in their organizations. Many of these surveys use the following questionnaire item: “If red tape is defined as ‘burdensome rules and procedures that have negative effects on the organization’s effectiveness,’ how would you assess the level of red tape in your organization?” Unfortunately, no research has tested the ways in which the language used in this item may bias responses. This research uses data from a 2010 national survey of 2,500 local government managers in the United States to test three variations of the Organizational Red Tape scale, investigating whether there is variation in perceived organizational red tape based on the question wording. The findings from this research contribute to the red tape literature by providing empirical evidence that the definition used in the Organizational Red Tape scale, a commonly used questionnaire item in public administration research, influences responses about red tape perceptions.

During the 75th anniversary of Public Administration Review (PAR), this article examines the social equity scholarship published in PAR from 1940 to 2013. Less than 5 percent of all articles published in PAR since its inception focus on social equity. The articles published in PAR are primarily concentrated within the areas of personnel and public policy. Very few articles were published in the areas of budgeting or ethics. While social equity scholarship published in PAR has made a valuable contribution to understanding the career inequities of women and minorities in the public sector, scholars and professionals need to more thoroughly examine the black box of agency practice and structural inequities to examine why they persist. The challenge for future social equity research in public administration is to examine broader dimensions of equity and to understand how social inequities in administration can be mitigated.

Representative bureaucracy research has examined the influence of race and ethnicity on policing outcomes, yet little is known about police use of force specifically at the individual-level. To address this topic more meticulously, we utilize individual-level data (from Indianapolis and Dallas police departments) to explore differences in the amount of force used by officers in ethnic, racial, and gender matches in police–civilian dyads. Findings suggest that there are heightened levels of force used when there is racial and gender incongruenc between the officer and the civilian, particularly White officers interacting with Black civilians. We discuss how this finding may impact police departments moving forward.

The author begins with the statement “A theory of policy politics must start with a model of political society, that is, a model of the simplest version of society that retains the essential elements of politics.” She chooses the word Greek word “polis”, which means city-state. This word is fitting because it describes an entity small enough to have very simple forms of organization yet large enough to embody the elements of politics. In searching for the elements of politics, it is helpful to use the market model as a foil because of its predominance in contemporary policy discussions. The contrast between the models of political and market society will illuminate the ways the market model grossly distorts political life.

Non-elected, non-appointed federal employees, referred to as bureucrats, are among the many policy actors that participate in policy discourse. This article investigates whether bureaucrats’ administrative discourse promotes economic equality, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from congressional testimonies (n=34) before and after the enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, this study discusses the role of public administrators as contributors to welfare policy discourse and the resulting implcations for the fight for equality and equal citizenship.

In the United States, nearly 1.7 million youth under the age of 18 run away from home and often end up homeless each year. Reports estimate that between 20% and 40% of the runaway and homeless youth population identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) (Durso & Gates, 2012 Durso, L. E., & Gates, G. J. (2012). Serving our youth: Findings from a national survey of service providers working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. Retrieved from https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Durso-Gates-LGBT-Homeless-Youth-Survey-July-2012.pdf [Google Scholar]; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation. (2014). Health and access to care and coverage for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals in the U.S. Retrieved from http://files.kff.org/attachment/Issue-Brief-Health-and-Access-to-Care-and-Coverage-for-LGBT-Individuals-in-the-US [Google Scholar]). This suggests that as many as 80,000 LGBT youth are homeless for over a week each year (National Alliance to End Homelessness, 2012 National Alliance to End Homelessness. (2012). LGBTQ youth national policy statement. Retrieved from http://www.endhomelessness.org/page/-/files/4552_file_LGBTQ_Youth_National_Policy_Statement_April_2012_Final.pdf [Google Scholar]). In addition, LGBT youth are more likely to suffer from poverty, substance abuse, violence, mental illness, and attempted suicide as a result of harassment and discrimination (Cray, Miller, & Durso, 2013 Cray, A., Miller, K., & Durso, L. (2013). Seeking shelter: The experiences and unmet needs of LGBT homeless youth. Retrieved from https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/LGBTHomelessYouth.pdf [Google Scholar]; Kaiser Family Foundation, 2014 Kaiser Family Foundation. (2014). Health and access to care and coverage for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender individuals in the U.S. Retrieved from http://files.kff.org/attachment/Issue-Brief-Health-and-Access-to-Care-and-Coverage-for-LGBT-Individuals-in-the-US [Google Scholar]; Swan, 2014 Swan, W. (2014). Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender civil rights: A public policy agenda for uniting a divided America. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press. doi:10.1201/b17485[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Grounded in social equity theory (Frederickson, 2010 Frederickson, H. G. (2010). Social equity and public administration: Origins, developments and applications. New York, NY: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315700748[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991 Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. doi:10.2307/1229039[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), this article argues that additional legal protections are necessary in order to ensure the constitutional rights of LGBT youth. A case study of the Youth Empowered Society (YES) in Baltimore City is provided as an example of a service-delivery model for this vulnerable population. Best practices are identified and anti-discrimination policies are recommended.

Shared workplace experiences of lesbian and gay police officers in the United Kingdom

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Previous research incorporates Habermas’ theory of communicative action with implications of social media for public discourse, yet few studies consider the theory’s relevance and applicability to public administrators. This article addresses this weak link by focusing on the administration legitimacy dilemma. While social media can be useful to public administrators facilitating collaborative interactions with citizens, these platforms are not automatically suited to public participation in governance. Habermas’ theory offers a framework for understanding these possibilities and challenges, as well as adapting social media constructively to administrative practice.

Despite increasing research into public sector innovation, there remains a need for more theory and evidence about the sources (actors) and outcomes (benefits) of innovation. Thus, this study examines the effects of four important sources of innovation (government, organizational leaders, employee workgroup, and members of the public) on the perceived organizational benefits of innovation in the public sector. Using survey data from the Australian Public Service (n = 3,775), the findings suggest that bottom-up innovations, particularly ideas emanating from the employee workgroup, are crucial for bringing about positive effects (as measured by decreasing costs, improving processes, and increasing service quality). In contrast, ideas emanating from organizational leaders are negatively associated with organizational benefits. Nevertheless, high-quality leadership moderates the adverse effects of top-down innovations. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as future research directions for the study of public sector innovation, are discussed.

A good deal of research has demonstrated how public service motivation (PSM) facilitates desirable organizational attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and work effort. Other research has demonstrated that PSM predicts higher levels of social capital and altruistic behavior in society. Between these two strands of PSM research, there is a gap in knowledge about whether PSM matters to citizenship behavior internal to the organization. This article tests the direct and indirect relationship between individual levels of PSM and interpersonal citizenship behavior using a structural equation model. We also account for the effect of organizational environment by incorporating a measure of co-worker support. We find that PSM has a direct and positive effect on interpersonal citizenship behavior in public organizations, even when accounting for the significant role of co-worker support.

This article seeks to put the “public” back in public values research by theorizing about the potential of direct citizen participation to assist with identifying and understanding public values. Specifically, the article explores eight participatory design elements and offers nine propositions about how those elements are likely to affect the ability of administrators to identify and understand public values with regard to a policy conflict. The article concludes with a brief discussion about potential directions for future research.

Social equity is a pillar of public administration, yet its actualization remains elusive. The path forward to closing persistent social equity gaps requires the utilization of quantitative intersectionality in public administration. This article explores the literature related to quantitative intersectionality and the imperative for use in the scholarship and practices of public administration. To exemplify this concept in practice, we present a case study examining Vocational Rehabilitation performance data reports. Findings illustrate how quantitative intersectionality provides an opportunity to unpack overlapping identities for people with disabilities whose individual characteristics include historically oppressed race/ethnicity and gender identities. Findings assert the imperative for using quantitative intersectionality to achieve social equity for all.

Queer theory, understood here as a set of political/politicized practices and positions which resist normative knowledge and identities, has emerged as a theoretical perspective having important emancipatory and explanatory power in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Queer theory resists definition ipso facto, residing as it does within a postructuralist paradigm. It has not hitherto featured within the discipline of public administration and we argue the case for its utilisation in this field by first explicating the theory. Here we develop a way of using queer theory to analyse data, notably through the identification of the ‘moments’ of a queer theory analysis: identification of the norms that govern identity, analysis of what is allowable within those norms, and exploration of what is unspeakable. We demonstrate its use via an empirically‐based case study. The lessons from this exercise are then applied to some of our earlier work which we re‐read through a queer theory lens. This shows the great explanatory power offered by the theory, in that it can develop insights that previously have been inaccessible. We conclude with recommendations for its broader application and wider use within public administration.

Achieving a representative bureaucracy that reflects the attitudes, values, and policy choices of women and racial minorities is imperative, as the gap in the representation of those groups in the federal workforce is growing. We examine to what extent female and minority representation in political appointments, Senior Executive Service (SES), and General Schedule (GS) 1-15 levels reflect presidents’ commitment to diversity. We use data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to compare the tenures of presidents William J. Clinton(1993 to 2000), George W. Bush (2001-2008), and Barack H. Obama (2009-2013), and examine the employment trends from 1993 to 2013.

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Organizational scholars employing the theory of representative bureaucracy in their research have found that when public school teacher demographics mirror those of their students, teachers positively affect student performance. Little is known, however, about how organizational socialization affects positive representational effects on student outcomes. Teachers, however, are socialized differently into the organizational structure, largely through organizational social norms based on various professional aspects. This article analyzes the impact of professional socialization on representativeness by teachers’ credentials, employment status, and education levels. Using Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) elementary school data during the 2012–2014 school years, results show that representational effects differ depending on dimensions of student outcomes, and socialization moderating effects vary on the relationship between teacher representation and performance outcomes…

A growing number of people around the world identify, in some way, as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+); yet, these voices are noticeably absent from nonprofit research. To address issues of equity and the historic marginalization of LGBTQ+ people both societally and in the nonprofit sector, this manuscript seeks to answer the following questions: Why is it important to include sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (SOGIE) survey questions in nonprofit surveys? What are best practices for including SOGIE survey questions in nonprofit research? We present LGBTQ+ inclusive research strategies and suggested questions for inclusive SOGIE survey design. Though this article focuses primarily on surveying LGBTQ+ populations, it can also be instructive for general population surveys.

Promoting race-aware and gender-aware scholarship is essential for giving substance to social equity research. This review and introduction provides an account of one such initiative to promote race and gender scholarship through collaboration between Public Administration Review (PAR), and the Consortium of Race and Gender Scholars (CORGES), and introduces the PAR Race and Gender Symposium. CORGES is an informal group of scholars motivated by the pressing need to address issues of racial justice and gender justice in public administration and public policy scholarship. This PAR symposium is based on the CORGES inaugural conference, held virtually in September 2020. Conference organizers, with the help of Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Hall, devised and oversaw a thoughtful and detailed plan to provide developmental feedback before papers were submitted to PAR’s standard peer review process. The symposium is comprised of 14 research articles and 2 viewpoint contributions. In addition to describing symposium contributions, this review provides an account of CORGES origins and its ongoing intellectual and normative commitments on furthering inquiry on racializing and gendering, while also elaborating on the idea of everydayness of scholarly activism. CORGES, with a recently expanded board of advisors committed to centering public administration scholarship on race and gender, as well its intersection with other markers of oppression, continues to support academic research and public outreach on race and gender scholarship.

Western governments have used regulation to progress gender equality for workforces in both the private and public sectors, yet gender equality has not yet been achieved. While governments have used various regulatory forms, Dickens (1999) argued that a tripod of collective bargaining, legislation and human resource policy would progress gender equality. Little consideration has been given to how these elements of the tripod fit together. We apply Dickens’ tripod to examine the regulation of gender equality in one Australian public sector. We use institutional analysis, drawing on historical and current documents, legislation, collective bargaining frameworks and human resource policy to examine how the regulatory tripod interlocks, and whether renewed commitments to public sector gender equality can be achieved in the current regulatory environment. We identify regulatory incongruence within the Australian public service and argue for improved congruence to progress gender equality, although we also note that congruence on its own does not lead to better outcomes. We identify that the legs of the tripod are not mutually reinforcing and that all legs need to be supported by better implementation. We extend Dicken’s tripod to provide a new path to progress public sector workplace gender equality, enriching both theory and practice.

Using a 5% sample of the 2000 Census, we present the first estimates of the percentages of federal, state, and local government employees who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB). For each state, we estimate that percentage not only for its total state and local government workforce but also for three occupations where active representation of LGB interests may be the most important: managers, teachers, and police. We then try to explain variation in LGB representation. Using states as units of analysis, we examine the effects of the LGB share of the labor force, gay rights laws, executive orders, and supportive public opinion on LGB representation. Using individual-level data, we examine whether differences in education, work experience, gender, race/ethnicity, and occupation explain differences between partnered LGBs and heterosexuals in probabilities of working for government.

Representative bureaucracy and workforce diversity have become central topics in the field of public administration. Although representation and diversity are distinct concepts, public administration researchers often conflate them. This study seeks to provide analytical clarity by outlining and comparing the various conceptual definitions of representation and diversity. We also explain the causal logic of how representation and diversity influence organizational performance. Finally, with South African local government as the research setting, we examine the empirical relationship between these two concepts and explore how different forms of representation and diversity are related to organizational performance.

Throughout much of representative bureaucracy literature, scholars have primarily focused on the representation of people seen as other in the professional workforce—people of color and women. However, whiteness and masculinity have been central to the development of public administration as a field of scholarship and practice. As a field, we have often avoided explicit discussions regarding the impact whiteness and masculinity. We argue that silences around race and gender have significant implications. Using representative bureaucracy as a frame, we seek to highlight how acknowledging whiteness and masculinity in our scholarship can help provide a more comprehensive understanding of race and gender in public administration.

This article identifies the ways that White supremacy manifests throughout the field of public administration in its research and scholarship. Through a critical discourse analysis of symposia over a period of 20 years (2000–2020) in three foremost public administration journals, this paper investigates the extent to which each journal either reinforces or resists systemic racism. Peer-reviewed journals serve as gatekeepers to advancing and shaping the direction of research; as such, symposia are a mechanism through which editors signal interest, create intellectual space, open dialogue in a particular research direction, and share editorial power with guest editors who either represent marginalized or hegemonic identities and positions. Our analysis reveals there is an opportunity to enhance race-consciousness, intentional anti-racist language, power-sharing, and resistance in future symposia. The article concludes by offering a path forward toward dismantling, reconciling, and repairing the entrenched, systemic, and historic racism and anti-Blackness in the field of public administration.

This article was inspired by the special invitation to the Minnowbrook 50th Anniversary Conference: Rethinking the Administrative State. Participants were asked to write a concept paper discussing a critical issue or topic public administration, as a field, must address. As the legitimacy of the administrative state is constantly being threatened by systems of domination that seek to marginalize people with intersecting identities, public administrators must be stewards of democracy and work on behalf of all citizens. This essay advocates for the adoption of an intersectional framework in public administration because such a frame provides administrators with the knowledge, skills, and tools to incorporate multiple perspectives and ideologies, embrace difference, and work toward finally securing fairness, justice, and equity for all.

The purpose of this paper is to explores the contemporary workplace experiences of
lesbian and gay officers who serve across the UK.
Using an online survey, the research asked lesbian and gay
officers to share their experiences in law enforcement environments. Acknowledging the changing
climate in many law enforcement environments, this respondents here were asked to focus on both
positive and negative experiences in the workplace.
Findings – The responses of 243 police officers revealed that lesbian and gay officers face barriers to
equal employment opportunities similar to those faced by women and other minorities in law
enforcement, but lesbian officers appear to experience and witness lower levels of discrimination than
gay male police officers. Attitudinal bias against lesbian and gay officers remains a significant problem
in the force. Lesbian officers report feelings of tokenism at higher levels than gay male police officers.
Future research endeavors should analyze any differences
between the experiences of different lesbians and gay men at different levels of visibility within law
enforcement, including “out” and “closeted” officers. Research about when officers come out as lesbian
or gay – during training, on the force, after they retire – would be insightful in understanding officers’
perceptions.
The research suggests that police departments in the UK have made good
strides in opening the law enforcement workforce, but continue to face on-going challenges in creating
fair, diverse, and representative work environments for lesbian and gay officers. Specifically, agencies
should review policies where supervisor have discretion over the employment-related actions. By not
meetings the challenges of a more diverse workplace, agencies risk lower job satisfaction, and
decreased police effectiveness, especially on community policing environments.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce social enterprise self-employment programs (SEPs) as a two-dimensional human capital investment strategy that can potentially advance economic development. Design/methodology/approach – SEPs are frequently utilized as a tool for increasing economic self-sufficiency in poor communities. Literature discussing the use of commercial enterprise SEPs to increase economic development highlights the potential for creating the similar programs geared toward creating social enterprises. Human capital theory is used to illustrate how social enterprise SEPs can foster human capital, a predictor of economic growth and development. Examples of existing social enterprise SEPs are discussed to highlight how they can be designed. Cases of human capital-oriented
social enterprises are also used to outline different business forms social enterprise SEPs can help create. Findings – This general review paper suggests that social enterprise SEPs can be a sound two-dimensional human capital investment strategy. It argues that social enterprise SEPs can train aspiring social entrepreneurs to create businesses than subsequently foster human capital in their local communities. Research limitations/implications – This paper introduces the concept of social enterprise SEPs, opening up a new area of research for scholars to explore. Researchers should examine participant and
organizational factors of existing social enterprise SEPs to assess their impact, as literature has linked them to success rates of commercial SEPs. Practical implications – This paper emphasizes the need for SEPs to offer task-related training as opposed to general business training to prepare social entrepreneurs in effort to run successful social enterprises. Originality/value – The concept of social enterprise SEPs is new, and literature pertaining to it is scarce. This paper introduces them as a tool for attending to community problems while equipping
future generations of social entrepreneurs with the skills to create social enterprises.

By2018, the United States was (again) faced with a number of turbulent and divisive issues. In response, the Minnowbrook at 50 conference identified several critical areas of emphasis to advance social equity in research, teaching, and the practice of public administration. In this essay, we highlight these renewed efforts to describe its progress during the past five years (e.g., 2018–2023), as well as review the conceptual development of social equity in public administration prior to the Minnowbrook at 50 conference (e.g., pre-2018). We conclude with a re-examination of the future of social equity in public administration by upholding past principles, while encouraging new practices, pedagogy, and scholarship within the social equity domain (e.g., post-2023).

This paper focuses on the importance of transgender education in public affairs programs, particularly as its students prepare to enter an increasingly diverse workforce in the 21st century. The paper first connects transgender awareness and education to the social equity literature. To date, attention within the social equity literature has primarily focused on race/ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, on women. However, issues of gender identity and sexual orientation have largely been missing from the social equity dialogue. This paper aims to fill the void. Next, the paper examines the transgender movement as a means to eliminate transgender oppression from the workplace. The paper also includes a survey conducted with 26 University of Vermont public affairs graduate students and 68 undergraduate students across disciplines also enrolled at the university. The surveys revealed attitudes about transgender citizens and their rights. The paper concludes with tangible strategies for working with transgender organizations and infusing transgender education into the public affairs curriculum.

As the architect of racial disparity, racism shapes the vulnerability of communities. Socially vulnerable communities are less resilient in their ability to respond to and recover from natural and human‐made disasters compared with resourced communities. This essay argues that racism exposes practices and structures in public administration that, along with the effects of COVID‐19, have led to disproportionate infection and death rates of Black people. Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index, the authors analyze the ways Black bodies occupy the most vulnerable communities, making them bear the brunt of COVID‐19’s impact. The findings suggest that existing disparities exacerbate COVID‐19 outcomes for Black people. Targeted universalism is offered as an administrative framework to meet the needs of all people impacted by COVID‐19.

The military and the family are “greedy institutions” that require the full attention of their members. Being aware of the tension between work and family, the United States military has developed family support policies that are more generous than legally required to ensure personnel readiness. However, family formation remains a major obstacle for recruitment, retention, and integration of women. Using administrative data, this research shows that fathers were more likely to leave prematurely for family reasons than childless men, particularly among non-Hispanic Black and American Indian/Alaska Native men. However, women who gave birth while in service were much less likely to leave for work–family reasons than childless women, while the same could not be said for women who joined as mothers and had no additional children. The results reflect the gendered logic of the organization and the narrow conceptualization of work–family conflict, both of which perpetuate gender-role stereotypes.

The military and the family are “greedy institutions” that require the full attention of their members. Being aware of the tension between work and family, the United States military has developed family support policies that are more generous than legally required to ensure personnel readiness. However, family formation remains a major obstacle for recruitment, retention, and integration of women. Using administrative data, this research shows that fathers were more likely to leave prematurely for family reasons than childless men, particularly among non-Hispanic Black and American Indian/Alaska Native men. However, women who gave birth while in service were much less likely to leave for work-family reasons than childless women, while the same could not be said for women who joined as mothers and had no additional children. The results reflect the gendered logic of the organization and the narrow conceptualization of work–family conflict, both of which perpetuate gender-role stereotypes.

How do states impact whether employers provide work-family benefits like childcare and paid family leave, especially in national contexts of low social policy spending? What out- comes for women’s professional advancement and gender equality more broadly should we expect from these interventions? And what does public opinion tell us about what people think employers ought to be doing privately that the state is not? I explore these questions in this three-paper dissertation.

The United States is built on and reinforced by exploitation and oppression, especially the genocide “of Native Americans, and the theft of their lands, and the extensive enslavement of Africans” (Feagin, 2006, p. 2). The highest objective of public service is to improve people’s lives, and yet, the U.S. has created policies and programs benefiting white people and disadvantaging Black people and other people of color.

By introducing the concept of “structural advocacy organizations,” this study theorizes and tests the boundary conditions within which organizations designed to protect the rights of disenfranchised groups promote structural changes at the intersection of gender and race. We test these claims on Brazil’s “women’s police stations,” a type of structural advocacy organization with greater female representation on staff and with specialized procedures and an institutional mandate to address violence against women. The analysis indicates that homicides are lower among the population of women in municipalities which have women’s police stations. However, within this group, homicides committed against women who self-identify as “black” and “brown” are lower only in municipalities that are characterized by high levels of female education and in metropolitan areas with infrastructure development. The results suggest that improving intersectional outcomes for women who are disenfranchised on race requires complementary policies and institutional mandates to address racialized violence.

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Past research has shed important light on the dark side of individuals’ public service motivation (PSM) in relation to their own well-being. This study turns attention to the role of leader PSM and asks whether it could have a curvilinear relationship with subordinate emotional exhaustion. Drawing from the person–environment (P-E) fit perspective, this study proposes that this curvilinear relationship is mediated by perceptions of person–supervisor (PS) fit and moderated by subordinate PSM. The results from the field and two experimental vignette studies in Thailand provide support for the proposed hypotheses. In particular, higher levels of emotional exhaustion and lower levels of PS fit were observed at the low and high levels of leader PSM, whereas the moderate level of leader PSM was associated with lower emotional exhaustion and higher PS fit. The results from the experimental studies further indicate that individuals with high PSM, in comparison with those with low PSM, perceived a higher PS fit with leaders who have moderate to high levels of PSM, in turn, experiencing less emotional exhaustion. These findings highlight the potential dark side of leader PSM, which lends further credence to the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect. Nevertheless, these effects also depend on employees’ PSM levels.

Empirical research on the difference that gender makes is sparse. This study is the first step toward providing evidence that agencies led by women perform better than those led by men. Using the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) data, this study examines the research question: Are women improving federal government agency performance? Preliminary results indicate that they do. The broader goal of social justice frames the discussion of findings.

This article examines how organizational and supervisory supports, directly and indirectly, impact employee engagement in U.S. federal agencies during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study applies two analysis models for two different sample groups: federal workers who were required to be physically present at a worksite during the pandemic and those who were not required to do so. Drawing from the sampling frame comprised of “permanently employed, non-political, non-seasonal, full- or part-time federal employees” in pay status as of October 2019, the findings from the U.S. Federal Employment Viewpoint Survey 2020 indicate that organizational and supervisory supports directly impact employee engagement regardless of employees’ work arrangements. However, work engagement is not increased by organizational and supervisory supports that actively encourage employees to use conventional incentives such as work–life balance policies. At the organizational level, this study suggests the need to redesign strategies to motivate public agents to engage in the agency’s mission because conventional and systemic employee support may be ineffective as currently designed. Overall, this study sheds more light on existing studies of public human resource management by examining employee engagement according to work arrangements during the pandemic.

Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of the introduction and implementation of a flexible work policy intended in part to improve gender equality at a STEM professional organization, I develop grounded theory on how managers’ gender shapes their implementation of such initiatives. I identify an equality policy paradox in which women managers, who openly support gender equality, are more likely than men managers to limit the policy. This apparent contradiction between intentions and actions is reconciled through an interactional role-based mechanism. Specifically, in this setting women managers encounter barriers to developing technical expertise, client relations, and respected authority. They respond by engaging extensively with subordinates, which allows them to effectively manage by brokering information (as an alternative to technical and client-facing tasks) and cultivating cooperation (as an alternative to formal authority). The policy undermines these interdependent activities; reflecting this, women managers generally oppose it. Men managers tend not to experience these constraints, and they focus on technical and client-related tasks that are largely independent of subordinates. The policy maintains these activities; reflecting this, they implement it. By identifying the equality policy paradox and the mechanism underlying it, this study advances theory on managers’ implementation of equality-related practices and policies as well as theory on gender and management.

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion—values that target structural inequities in communities and workplaces—have taken on greater urgency in the aftermath of the racial and societal tensions of the past several years. This article examines how selected local governmental jurisdictions are responding to the call for greater equity and inclusion in their organizations. Experiences of selected “best in class” cities are reviewed in their efforts to advance a transformative approach to human resource policies and processes. Strategies for implementation and pitfalls to avoid are identified. The article concludes by acknowledging that this work—work which interrupts the existing patterns that tend to maintain the status quo of structural disadvantages around issues such as hiring, pay equity, and advancement and that limit a culture of inclusion—is hard, is ongoing, and is overdue but is critical and calls for immediate action.

The first symposium on women in public administration was published in 1976 and focused on three central topics: discrimination against, underrepresentation of, and underutilization of women in public service. Analyses of why conditions of discrimination and underutilization existed, as well as remedies to these challenges, were the crux of the 1976 symposium. Over four decades later, these issues are still pressing and continue to dominate the conversation surrounding women in public administration in the United States. The renewed and continued focus on equal pay, paid family leave, the absence of women in key leadership positions, women’s health care options, and reproductive rights remain center stage in the national policy arena, including the presidential debates. Internationally, gender parity was a priority agenda item during the 2016 Economic Forum, where only 18% of the participants present for a discussion about the “state of the world” were women. As a discipline, public administration continues to explore the ongoing challenges and progress of women with a degree of consensus on the common obstacles and work to be done for continued progress. However, what the key challenges and opportunities are for women in the 21st century, and how we can rethink long-standing issues from diverse perspectives are now pressing questions demanding scholarly attention. This symposium highlights what is missing from the conversation and how, in the field of public administration, we can be leaders on these topics.

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Inclusion in the workplace is defined as the extent to which individuals perceive that they are part of significant processes in organizations. This article explores the determinants of workplace inclusion by asking: How does the demographic composition of social networks inside and outside of the workplace affect perceived inclusion in the workplace? We apply literature on social identity theory and social network theory to develop and test hypotheses on professional sub-network demographic composition using the linear regression analysis on data from the 2011 National Science Foundation–funded national survey of academic faculty on work environment and careers in US universities. Among other results, we find that perceived inclusion is explained by the interactions between race, gender, and demographic composition of professional networks. Findings provide new insights for the management of diversity in the workplace.

Public organizations have long sought to increase workforce diversity and employee inclusion, a goal that has only increased in recent years. The study examines a racially diverse state government agency to explore how employee perceptions of diversity and inclusion relate to workplace happiness, employee engagement, and job satisfaction. Using original survey data of over 1,800 workers, this study explores how employees perceive diversity and inclusion, how these perceptions relate to overall workplace happiness, and examines the factors that may lead to more positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. The analysis employs principal component analysis and multilevel regression modeling. The findings underscore the connections between overall workplace happiness and positive perceptions of diversity and inclusion. The key takeaways for public organizations include the importance of senior leadership when it comes to cultivating a diverse and inclusive environment. Finally, a notable finding is the statistically significant increase in positive feelings around inclusion and diversity for historically underrepresented racial groups and that low pay for long-term employees decreases these feelings.

Evidence has been somewhat mixed on how telework affects job satisfaction, career advancement, and relationships with supervisors. Larger samples and better measures of telework and control variables, however, suggest that frequent telework increased satisfaction with jobs, advancement opportunities, fair treatment, supervisors, and co-workers in both the 2012–2015 and the 2020 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys. A quasi-experimental analysis shows that switching to frequent telework during the pandemic decreased turnover intentions. Employees now understand the benefits of teleworking. Supervisors must learn to communicate and monitor performance online in this new reality or face increased resistance and turnover.

The climate crisis disproportionately impacts women and girls all over the world. To understand what the priorities in terms of policy are, an examination is conducted on the impacts taking place in South Asia (focusing on the countries of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), an area of the globe that is highly vulnerable to climate change and is characterized by having strong patriarchal values. Gender stereotypes and roles in the region heighten women and girls’ vulnerability to climate impacts, both in general and in situations of crisis resulting from extreme weather events. Deepening the understanding of the climate crisis’ impact on gender in South Asia, a region at the frontline of these effects, can assist in reaching a baseline understanding of the challenge from a global perspective. Methodologically, we reviewed an extensive body of literature, both specialty books and scientific articles, recent institutional reports as well as news or journalistic reports from reliable international press. In this research, the argument is made that today, climate action and urban development cannot be considered separately from women’s rights. Extensive scientific data and research support the integration of a gender perspective in urban adaptation standard practices, and priorities in terms of policy to safeguard women and girls are identified accordingly. The allocation of half of climate funds, including those of loss and damage, directly to women or women-led organizations is identified as being particularly relevant. Bold and ambitious policymaking is urgently needed to build capacity to face the multiple crises unfolding.

The social movements of the I960’s and 1970’s have had an irreversible positive impact on the wellbeing of all citizens in the 21st century United States. It can also be argued that social equity as a subfield of public administration and policy grew out of the I960’s though there is no definite way of knowing what the framers of the subfield were thinking or how they were influenced by the social movements of the time. Still, it is a reasonable assumption to believe that the framers were at least marginally influenced by the changing times. Therefore, social equity is used as a backdrop for social movements in the paper, which analyzes their importance for a modern day society. Specially, the social movements addressed in the paper include, the civil rights movement, women’s rights movement, the Internet Movement and the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) movement. The paper then turns its attention to the importance of race and the intersection of the same sex marriage debate. The paper asserts that African Americans and the Hispanic communities have been vilified and accused of being an alleged impediment to the progress of same sex marriage, especially regarding Proposition 8 in California. The paper presents evidence to the contrary of this well believed myth. Finally the paper concludes with clear and concise recommendations for addressing the issues mentioned in the paper.

Determining how to stimulate public employees’ voice behaviors has become a critical issue in both theory and practice. This article draws on the theories of participative management, leadership, role theory, and social identity theory and proposes a moderated mediation model to explore the mechanism by which participative leadership shapes public employees’ voice behaviors. To test this study’s hypotheses, we conduct a three-wave investigation of 739 public tax agency employees in the Yangtze River Delta area of China. The results show that participative leadership significantly predicts employees’ voice behaviors by enhancing their organizational identification. Furthermore, power distance moderates the relationship between participative leadership and organizational identification. These findings advance our understanding of how to motivate employees’ voice behaviors from the perspective of participative leadership in public organizations.

Studies of the ramifications of client race and ethnicity for bureaucrats’ judgments treat minority status as homogenous. Yet, individual identity does not boil down to race or ethnicity. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups likely vary in their experiences and capacity to overcome the negative sentiments and stereotypes that burden their inherited group. To transcend unidimensional explanations, we combine Van Oorschot’s deservingness framework and a gendered lens to study how the intersection of group identity and gender, as well as individuals’ work history, co-shape bureaucrats’ categorization of clients. Empirically, we analyze Israeli professionals’ categorization of applicants for state benefits, comparing their assessments of men and women of three social groups: the Jewish majority, ultra-orthodox Jews, and Muslims. Interpreting the empirical findings, we offer that underlying the effect of applicants’ group demographics are perceived cultural affinity to the majority and social contributions that vary with gender.

Studies of the ramifications of client race and ethnicity for bureaucrats’ judgments treat minority status as homogenous. Yet, individual identity does not boil down to race or ethnicity. Members of racial and ethnic minority groups likely vary in their experiences and capacity to overcome the negative sentiments and stereotypes that burden their inherited group. To transcend unidimensional explanations, we combine Van Oorschot’s deservingness framework and a gendered lens to study how the intersection of group identity and gender, as well as individuals’ work history, co-shape bureaucrats’ categorization of clients. Empirically, we analyze Israeli doctors’ categorization of applicants for state incapacity benefits, comparing their medical assessments of men and women of three social groups: the Jewish majority, Ultra-orthodox Jews, and Muslims. Interpreting the empirical findings, we offer that underlying the effect of applicants’ group demographics are perceived cultural affinity to the majority and social contributions that vary with gender.

Trans politics are gaining visibility and momentum and, increasingly, trans activists are forming projects and organizations focused on promoting political change. Given this context, this article examines how critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex might be incorporated into trans political analysis and how they could inform this moment of trans political institutionalization. Taking tools and lessons from antiracist and feminist scholars and activists and recognizing widespread critique of the co-optation of the lesbian and gay rights movement by neoliberalism, this article highlights alternatives to traditional nonprofit structures. The authors provide an in-depth look at 1 trans organization that employs a collective governance model and encourages the leadership of trans people of color, offering it as a potential model for emerging trans organizations.

Public sector professions are highly gender-dominant (e.g., police officers, teachers) and determined not only by professionals but also by gender roles. According to the role congruity theory, these social roles result in perceived (in)congruities between the jobholders’ gender and gender-dominant professions. This research investigates this intersection for several professions. Throughout three large-scale surveys (conducted in Austria), we first document the gender dominance of various public sector professions, and further analyze the effects from (in)congruities in gender-dominant professions. The findings are two-fold: First, for police officers, firefighters, politicians, nurses, and teachers, (in)congruities of job-holder’s gender with gender dominance of the profession result in positive (negative) ascriptions of job-related traits. However, (in)congruity effects are not confirmed for other gender-dominant professions outside the public sector. Second, no (in)congruity effects are found for perceived professionalism. Findings are important for policy makers, as well as recruiters and employers who aim to reduce gender-related disadvantages within public sector employment.

Immigration policies in the United States have not been explicitly race-based since the mid-20th Century. Nevertheless, the effects of contemporary US immigration enforcement practices are highly racialized. The further development of a “race conscious” approach in public policy and administration will help expand our understanding of the racialized dimensions of these policies and practices. Specifically, I call attention to how current approaches to immigration control disproportionately negatively affect non-White immigrants from the so-called “Global South,” contribute to racialization processes, and perpetuate racial inequality in the United States. Examples include the ways that undocumented immigration status is leading to the emergence of a new “underclass” in the United States, the separation and dissolution of Latino families through mass deportation, and the systematic criminalization of non-White undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Whereas efforts that prohibit employment discrimination based on factors such as race or sexual orientation require certain organizational changes, creating a transgender-inclusive workplace requires organizational changes that include personnel, policy, legal, and medical issues unique to transgender people. At present, it is not clear whether communities are actually implementing these organizational changes, even after adopting transgender-inclusive nondiscrimination laws. This research project surveyed 74 municipalities with transgender-inclusive nondiscrimination employments laws, in order to assess and better understand the state of transgender-inclusive public workplaces. The initial results of the survey suggest that although innovation continues to increase, implementation and enforcement remain low, affecting managers’ and employees’ abilities to operate in a transgender-inclusive environment. Recommendations are made to improve implementation and enforcement of transgender-inclusive nondiscrimination laws.

The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions persists. Existing research examines barriers women face in climbing organizational hierarchies, but we know less about women who break past the glass ceiling. Once women obtain supervisory positions, do they face additional hurdles in managing employees? Specifically, how does gender, gender congruence, and rule formalization influence employee rule compliance and trust? Using a survey experiment across both government and nonprofit contexts, we find that both men and women are more likely to trust men managers, but this gender gap is mitigated when rules are written. Gender congruence plays a role for rule compliance, where both men and women are more compliant when the supervisor matches their gender, while gender congruence is only a significant factor for enhancing trust for men. The findings advance role incongruence theory and have implications for the challenges women leaders face in terms of trust and rule following.

The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions persists. Existing research examines barriers women face in climbing organizational hierarchies, but we know less about women who break past the glass ceiling. Once women obtain supervisory positions, do they face additional hurdles in managing employees? Specifically, how does gender, gender congruence, and rule formalization influence employee rule compliance and trust? Using a survey experiment across both government and nonprofit contexts, we find that both men and women are more likely to trust men managers, but this gender gap is mitigated when rules are written. Gender congruence plays a role for rule compliance, where both men and women are more compliant when the supervisor matches their gender, while gender congruence is only a significant factor for enhancing trust for men. The findings advance role incongruence theory and have implications for the challenges women leaders face in terms of trust and rule following.

Building on prior research on leadership and gender, the current study explores whether leaders’ and subordinates’ genders influence the impact of leaders’ behaviors on subordinate attitudes. More specifically, this study identifies three moderator variables that might influence the relationship: gender congruence and gender combination between supervisor and subordinate and gender ratio (gender composite in a work unit). Using a sample of state government employees, the current study found that supervisors’ transformational leadership style was more likely to influence male subordinates’ feelings of psychological empowerment than female subordinates’ feelings of psychological empowerment, regardless of the supervisor’s gender and that the positive effect among male employees becomes weaker when they are in a work unit with more women. Ultimately, the findings from this study contribute to our knowledge base regarding leadership and gender, in general, and deepen our understanding of supervisor–subordinate gender dynamics and how these dynamics are associated with gender ratio in public sector organizations.

Organizational studies have long built a ‘business case’ for diversity, which today includes innovation capacity among the benefits of diverse workforces. Diversity’s impact on innovation has been tested in private firms, yet few systematic studies exist in public management. We address this challenge using a two-step dynamic panel data analysis via generalized methods of moment estimation in 36 European countries. The findings confirm that higher public workforce diversity leads to higher public service innovation. This effect, however, is mediated by the administrative ecosystem, where greater uniformity in managerial practices makes diversity more salient, an obstacle to unleash its innovative potential.

This paper explores the impacts of the dominant Hobbesian ontology and the Protestant ethic on individual experience within the United States, connecting the ideas of “disaster capitalism” and the “myth of the Individual” to explore the ways in which individual citizens are isolated, alienated, and subjugated. The paper identifies forms of isolation experienced by individuals in public administration, anti-poverty policies, and popular methods of citizen participation. Playing off the notion of “hollow government,” the paper argues that the Hobbesian ontology of fear and othering, along with Lockean Individualism, creates “hollow Individuals” by negating opportunities for interpersonal exchange of ideas. The paper suggests that the field of public administration can begin to counteract the paradox of Individualism, in part, by following Stivers’ (1994) model of the “listening bureaucrat.”

The complexity of the sexual harassment language of the #MeToo movement creates discontinuities that maymuddy intended communications. Yet understanding this language provides a fuller picture of the experiences that women face, Gender harassment has persisted in the workplace despite long-staning antidiscrimination policies, perhaps because of a unversal failure to recognize all forms of it- some of which are more pervasive and common than sexual abuse. This article considers the ability of the academy to affect sexual harassment in public administration. It discusses the implications of gender harassment, the least recognized form of sexual harassment, and makes recommendations for overcoming gender barriers in the academy and in practice. Evidence- based guidance for advacnging women in the academy may create more equitable and just spaces for teaching and learning. Public administration classrooms and scholarship represent critical opportunities to recognize patterns of organizations practice and systematically redress gender harassment in the workplace.

After 60 years of scholarship on the rule-bound bureaucratic personality, this article turns attention to the unbureaucratic personality. Identified by a willingness to bend rules, the unbureaucratic personality is thought to be influenced by individual and workplace attributes. The individual attributes investigated in this article include nonconformity, risk propensity, and public service commitment, all of which are expected to stimulate the unbureaucratic personality. Workplace attributes include formalization and centralization, which are expected to suppress the unbureaucratic personality, and red tape, which is expected to trigger it. These hypotheses are tested using mail survey data collected from employees of four cities in a midwestern state. The results of ordered probit modeling of the data suggest that nonconformity and risk taking increase the unbureaucratic personality, as do red tape and centralized workplaces. By contrast, the unbureaucratic personality appears to be diminished by public service commitment and workplace formalization. The implications of these results for the normative aspects of rule bending are discussed.

Mary Follett was both a woman in public service in myriad roles from social worker to presidential advisor and a female public intellectual giving voice to what would later be called a feminist perspective. Based on a forthcoming book, this paper summarizes the fullness of Follett’s thinking and discusses the manner in which she is frequently misinterpreted in the literature, arguing that these misunderstandings are due to a lack of awareness of, or ability to grasp, her underlying relational process ontology. Misinterpretations in both the management and public administration literature are considered, ending with a call for scholars in both specializations to reconsider their interpretations from a more in-depth understanding of her work.

“The interactions and relationships between front-line regulators and the regulated impact the implementation of environmental policy. Much of the existing research to date investigates the regulatory enforcement styles of regulators or the compliance motivations of firms. It is equally important to consider the role of women and their experiences as front-line workers. This qualitative research is one of the first to provide insight into the untold stories of women on the front-lines of environmental regulation. Through an examination of original interview data from 25 environmental regulators with the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (DEPA) and Montana Department of Environmental Quality (MT DEQ), the findings suggest steps must be taken to ensure the voices of women on the front-lines of environmental regulation are no longer overlooked. Instead, we recognize how their day-to-day experiences impact our understanding of the implementation of environmental regulations.”

Negativity against LGBTQ+ and gender equality symbols is escalating across Western European countries, including those at the forefront of sexual modernism. Drawing on data from Spain, this paper theorizes and finds that state-sponsored LGBTQ+ symbols receive significantly more negativity than other aspects of LGBTQ+ issues related to general and specific attitudes toward formal rights. The negativity is primarily explained by support for Vox, a radical right-wing party, and age. The study provides insights into the complexities of public opinion surrounding LGBTQ+ symbols, offering a nuanced understanding of the challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community in terms of acceptance and visibility. Furthermore, it highlights the influence of political affiliations and generational factors in shaping these attitudes.

The ability of nonprofit organizations to attract and retain the next generation of its workforce will play an integral role in the growth and vitality of the sector. Management literature provides a number of suggestions for nonprofit managers emphasizing a focus on enhancing non-compensation related job characteristics in order to attract and retain a young workforce. Yet, this literature largely ignores survey research which indicates that Generation Y employees value compensation and non-compensation related characteristics differently than previous generations. Before management changes are proposed and implemented by nonprofit managers, we must first understand how the nonprofit sector compensates Generation Y employees. This study enhances our understanding of wage differentials by using data from the 2001-2006 American Community Survey’s to examine a sample of approximately 178,000 young, educated employees.

According to national statistics there are somewhere between 1.6 and 2.8 million homeless youth in the United States. An inordinate percentage of these homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. The causes of homelessness among this group as well as the needed services are multifaceted and complex, making it what many would refer to as a wicked problem. This article argues that in order to address the wicked problem of homelessness among LGBTQ youth, collaborations across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors must occur. Examples of such collaborations are offered for consideration of others looking to address the issue.

Representative bureaucracy is one of the mechanisms used to achieve representative democracy. This article assesses how bureaucratic representation affects public access to administrative remedies, a recourse linked with social equity in public service organizations. Representative bureaucracy theory is applied to 14 years of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission demographics and outcomes data. The analysis asks whether passive representation trends parallel trends in active representation outcomes, using longitudinal workforce, charge, suit, and resolution data. Results suggest trends in client driven outcomes (charges) were consistent with passive representation, while organizational outcomes (suits and resolutions) outpaced disability representation but fell short of racial and gender representation. The trend analysis findings, which offer timely insights into the effects of human resource management, suggests organizational priorities and processes affect representation more than previously thought.

Is there symmetry between women and men in public management in terms of opportunity, power, and numbers? Mary Guy examines two decades of affirmative action initiatives. She finds the number of women in decision-making positions disproportionately low when compared to their numbers in the public work force. Women’s integration into the fabric of American governance has been marked by surges of progress followed by periods of quiescence. Her article compares the status of women to that of men in career public management positions and argues that women have a long way to go before they will reach parity.

Flexible work arrangement policies provide employees the flexibility to manage their work and personal lives. Despite various efforts of public organizations, struggles to simplify or integrate work and private life demands continue, resulting in employees’ lower satisfaction, higher stress, higher turnover, and lower productivity. Our study focuses on the social environments of individual employees by investigating how social networks affect individuals’ efforts to balance work and life in a higher education setting. Using a 2011 NSF-funded national survey of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) faculty in US universities, we examine the impact of multiplexity in social networks on work-life balance (WLB) and how the impact varies by gender. Our regression results suggest that the impact of relational multiplexity on WLB follows an inverse U-shape pattern and varies by gender. In particular, multiplex ties that individuals socialize outside their work can affect their WLB and the impact varies by gender.

In light of high unemployment and declining volunteer rates, this study examines the complex relationship between time, employment, and volunteering. Are unemployed people more likely to volunteer due to newfound time or to obtain some benefit? Alternatively, are the unemployed less likely to volunteer due to their loss of social ties or feelings of insecurity? A framework tying together four competing theories—opportunity cost, exchange, social ties, and attachment—into positive and negative influences is put forth and tested using pooled U.S. data from 2003 to 2013. The duration of unemployment emerges as a key factor, where volunteering decreases over time. Findings suggest organizations should recruit volunteers from untapped and under-represented groups, especially because the supply of volunteers is not endless. For example, unemployed volunteers devote more time but are less likely to receive an invitation to volunteer. Dedicated individuals may not volunteer simply because no one asks them

The field of public administration currently lacks a feminist perspective, i.e., one that problematizes women’s historical exclusion from public administration theory and raises topics and questions neglected as a result. Four important issues are suggested as areas where a feminist perspective might offer fresh insights: The question of administrative knowledge; the model of the ideal public servant; the nature of administrative discretion; and the dimensions of the administrative state.

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n late January 2020, the sensationalist Russianpolitician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made headlinesin Russian media when he falsely proclaimed thecoronavirus was a ploy by U.S. pharmaceuticalcompanies to profit from Chinese suffering. Zhirinovskyfirst made his provocative statement on the MoscowTalks radio station on January 27th. Moscow Today andother official Russian media channels quickly repeatedthe comment. By the following week global news outletsbegan reporting on the statement. For longtime Russia-watchers, the Russian state media’s use of Zhirinovsky’sdisinformation has been eerily similar to Soviet effortsto blame AIDS on the United States – a KGB effort known as Operation Infektion. Unlike the Cold War though, today millions of social media users—wittingly or unwittingly—ballooned the conspiracy theory out of control before governments could formulate and coordinate a response. To date, investigators have reported that the disinformation about coronavirus has become intractable, even for social media platform owners .This recent event adds to a growing corpus of evidence about social media-based state-sponsored disinformation activities. In late 2019, Oxford University and the Computational Propaganda Research Project reported, “Evidence of organized social media manipulation campaigns taking place is present in70 countries, up from 48 countries in 2018 and 28countries in 2017.” For example, over 140,000,000 users interacted with Internet Research Agency (IRA) content on Facebook and Instagram between 2015-2017. Andin August 2019, Twitter suspended “936 accounts originating from within the People’s Republic of China.” According to Twitter, “these accounts were deliberately and specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong,” and represented “the most active portions of a larger, spammy network of approximately 200,000accounts.”

This article identifies two models of nonprofit organization roles: the economic model, which emphasizes business-like methods, and the voluntary spirit model, which emphasizes participation and membership. Highly visible, professional nonprofit organizations must constantly struggle with the extent to which they are to emphasize their role as efficient and competitive economic actors or their role as institutions important to our democracy. After years of shifting toward the economic model, professional nonprofits may be ripe for reform. Simultaneously, they are confronting and engaging with the Internet. This article draws on examples of health-based citizen cyber-organizations to derive lessons for how professional nonprofit organizations can recapture their voluntary spirit generally and places an emphasis on participation and membership. Also derived are specific lessons on how professional nonprofits can use cyber-strategies to do so.

Traditional MPA programs that deliver public affairs education often use gender blind pedagogies. Gender blind pedagogies maintain that organizational practices and decision-making processes are gender neutral and have similar outcomes to both men and women who engage in public service. Gender neutral assumptions in PA education perpetuate gender neutral research and practice. Using critical gender pedagogy, we (1) examine current practices of discussing gender in PA education, (2) review pedagogical suggestions from other fields (particularly English and gender studies) that have adopted critical gender pedagogies, (3) identify elements of gender-sensitive course design, (4) develop a five- part pedagogical framework to showcase major elements needed for public affairs curricula to be more gender-sensitive, and (5) apply this framework to model how six MPA core courses can better address gender. This paper aims to deliver an alternative gender- sensitive pedagogical approach that breaks the cycle of gender-blind practices.

Everyone who aspires to more effective public service should read this book. It provides a compelling antidote to the managerial focus of theory and practice in public administration. Written with the aim of inspiring and rekindling a mission for public service, Transformational Public Service weaves together theory and stories from actual practice to show that public service can (and does) advance the goals of democracy, inclusiveness, and social and economic justice. Eight practitioners from government and non-governmental organizations at all levels – from the street to the executive office – tell their personal stories of transformational public service. Theory, poetry, and popular culture references are woven around the stories. Both students and practitioners will discover new ways of thinking in this book that will enable them to transform their own administrative practices. As the authors note in their prologue: “As we listened to these stories, we heard people say that public service can be and is transformational (transforms institutions, practices, and people’s lives and experiences) in ways that serve democracy, engagement, and social and economic justice. The public service they practice is collaborative, humanistic, emancipatory, inclusive, and diverse.”

This article examines an emerging issue within the field of governance, the intersection of public policy with transgender identity. It is important that administrators better understand this issue given the lack of consistency in the current policy framework. This article addresses transgender identity’s intersection with employment law, marriage, hate crimes, and the current legal framework for sex reassignment in the United States. The article also addresses how transgender identity contrasts with gay and lesbian identities with regard to public policy. Given widespread bias against this population, administrators are called to ensure that these individuals receive equal and equitable policy treatment.

The representative bureaucracy theoretical framework explores the link between bureaucrats’ social and demographic characteristics and their likelihood to take actions that benefit citizens with whom they share identities. This meta-review analyzes 96 peer-reviewed representative bureaucracy journal articles to explore how the theoretical framework is described and applied and to track the contextual development of representative bureaucracy over time. Despite how far the field has come in connecting bureaucratic identity to normative policy outcomes, we find that the application of the theoretical framework is operationalized using a narrow set of shared identities (race and gender). In addition, we conclude that representative bureaucracy has been applied in limited geographic, methodological, and policy areas. Our article argues that the absence of studies that focus on intersectional identities, different geographic and policy contexts, and more qualitative and mixed methods impedes our understanding of the link between passive and active representation.

This article argues that a society’s level of social trust influences employers’ hiring strategies. Employers can focus either on applicants’ potential and select on foundational skills (e.g., social skills, math skills) or on their readiness and select on more-advanced skills (e.g., pricing a derivative). The higher (lower) the social trust—people’s trust in their fellow members of society—the more (less) employers are willing to invest in employees and grant them role flexibility. Employers in higher-trust societies are therefore more attentive to applicants’ potential, focusing more on foundational skills than on advanced skills. We empirically test this theory by using a novel dataset of more than 50 million job postings from the 28 European Union countries. We find that the higher a country’s social trust, the more its employers require foundational skills instead of advanced skills. Our identification strategy takes advantage of multinational firms in our sample and uses measures of bilateral (country-to-country) trust to predict job requirements, while including an instrumental variable and fixed effects on country, year, employer, and occupation. These findings suggest a novel pathway by which social trust shapes employment practices and organizational strategies.

The U.S. criminal justice system is designed to handle extreme cases of sexual misconduct, but the system has not adapted well to less extreme (but no less important) sexually inappropriate behaviors. As our understanding of sexual misconduct and impropriety evolves, the need for a new system of accountability seems apparent. The authors call for a new approach to providing justice for survivors/victims: the adoption of a truth and reconciliation model. This model involves providing a public forum for survivors/victims to testify to the events of their victmization and for offenders to admit previous wrongdoing, take responsibility, and ask forgiveness. While it is not appropriate for handling illegal behaviors, a truth and reconciliation model would be ideal for incidents that are not illegal but violate our evolving social norms.

Public confidence has often been viewed as a critical indicator of legitimacy within the nonprofit sector. Indeed, confidence is believed to be among one of the sector’s most important commodities. Surveys, however, have shown that the public does not always have much confidence in the performance of nonprofit organizations. Although this lack of confidence is certainly concerning, few studies have assessed whether the public actually has any awareness of what nonprofit organizations are, and no studies have examined the personal characteristics associated with more (or less) nonprofit awareness. Thus, by using individual‐level data from a survey of public attitudes toward nonprofits in San Diego County (n = 1002), the purpose of this study was to explore how individual characteristics relate to nonprofit awareness and to examine the extent to which awareness of the sector influences confidence in the performance of nonprofit organizations. The findings from the study indicate that nonprofit awareness varies by several individual‐level characteristics—with many of those likely to be the most dependent on nonprofit services being the least aware of the sector. The findings also indicate that awareness of the sector is the most significant predictor of confidence in the performance of nonprofits.

Gender Inequality persists in the public services in many Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, despite decades or policy and strategic initiatives…

Numerous studies associate ethical leadership with ethical behavior in the public sector. By contrast, the effects of unethical leadership in the public sector have largely not been explored. Yet, unethical leadership need not beget unethical followership. Instead, we theorize that some bureaucrats may perceive unethical leadership as a moral threat and respond to it with moral compensation and greater ethical behavior. We provide evidence for our theorized effect through a vignette experiment with 19,852 bureaucrats in Chile. Bureaucrats exposed in the vignette to unethical role modeling by their superior or peers react with greater ethical awareness and ethical intent. This effect is concentrated among bureaucrats recruited through merit-based, public service criteria rather than connections, and thus bureaucrats who more likely feel morally threatened by unethical leadership. This suggests that unethical leadership in the public sector may differ in its consequences from the mere absence of ethical leadership.

The aim of this article is to unravel the determinants of inclusive leadership by combining mixed methods in two phases to explore and test theoretically grounded personal and organizational antecedents of inclusive leadership. The first qualitative phase used semi-structured interviews with public managers, while the second quantitative phase tested assumptions using survey data from employees working in the Dutch public sector. The findings support the hypothesized positive association of leader humility as well as a flexible culture on inclusive leadership. Public managers also tend to have, both social justice and business case arguments for diversity, affecting their inclusive leadership. Motivation and discretionary room enable public managers to cope with structural constrains. Top management support is important to change organizational culture and norms, motivating and stimulating lower level managers to actively show inclusive leadership. Overall, the findings contribute to a better understanding of inclusive leadership in a public sector context.

This exploratory research empirically examines the impact of the utilization of diversity organizational practices on the career progression of women to executive positions in state-level government organizations in the United States. The design includes an online survey instrument sent to a purposive sample of 600 female administrative agency executives in 50 states. A standard OLS regression model tested the predictive power of diversity utilization practice variables on the dependent variable, career progression of women to upper level management. As hypothesized, women who utilized diversity initiatives offered by their organizations decreased the amount of time it took them to achieve executive-level status(B = – .243, p = .065). It is suggested that in order to guarantee that women, and particularly minority women, participate in the effective managing of public organizations – regulations, laws, procedures and policies must be advanced through utilization

Interprofessional education (IPE) is on the rise in healthcare fields for several reasons. IPE teaches the collaborative skills necessary for healthcare students to succeed in an increasingly diverse workforce. IPE also creates space for healthcare organizations to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) objectives within curriculum and clinical practice. IPE’s focus on diversity is important because recent research indicates a lag in DEI initiatives in healthcare. To better integrate DEI objectives into healthcare curricula, faculty from an OTD and MAT program developed an interprofessional assignment that could be implemented across multiple programs. The assignment was designed to improve DEI and IPE competence in OT and AT education.

An OTD and a MAT course were chosen to pilot the IPE assignment. These courses were selected for two reasons: curricular content and logistic feasibility. A virtual synchronous and asynchronous format was determined as the best structure for the assignment. Students were asked to complete assigned readings and review a video about culturally sensitive topics, meet as an interprofessional group to discuss a healthcare encounter between a clinical staff and a transgender individual, and participate in an intraprofessional discussion board activity.

The primary student learning outcomes for this assignment were threefold 1) Demonstrate use of interprofessional collaborative skills such as communication and roles responsibilities 2) Analyze how interprofessional collaborative skills might be utilized to care for diverse populations and 3) Integrate the use of DEI constructs within discussions of planned care. A rubric was used to assess students in each of these areas. Additionally, a thematic analysis was generated to understand how students’ use of interprofessional education skills and knowledge could enhance the care of diverse populations.

Both groups of students in the pilot scored well. The average overall grade for occupational students was 37.25/40 (93 %) and the average overall grade for the athletic training students was 36/40 (90 %). The assignment analysis identified three improvements in student understanding, specifically enhanced quality of care, decreased knowledge gaps, and greater ability to check biases and accountability.

As we began writing this paper, there was no policy language about critical race theory. No burning books in states. The paper evolved as language and symbols evolved. We do not and cannot claim this is a total history of all signs and symbols associated with historical civil rights movements. Our focus in a snapshot of how the word “woke” moved—and continues to move—from its roots in the Black community to what is today a symbol-laden word easily weaponized because it lives in its own hyperreality.
There is an ongoing debate, situated in the education literature, regarding Marxism versus postmodernism as it relates to social justice. We do not have space here to detail the entire thread but can recommend Atkinson ( 2000; 2002) and Cole and Hill ( 1995).

Despite a long and storied history, patronage and the functions it plays in American politics and public administration are still very much a mystery. This paper examines how patronage has been used and understood in American political science and public administration. The author calls for a reexamination of the concept based on developments found in the field of anthropology. In an effort to generate future scholarship, the author introduces a typology of patronage styles based on this reexamination.

Public administration literature has been building more evidence about whistleblowing and gender, and whistleblowing and public service motivation. Yet, despite the well-developed theoretical argument of the socialization effect on public service motivation and gender, little effort has been undertaken to study their simultaneous relationships with whistleblowing. This study fills this gap suggesting that whistleblowing mechanisms for the public sector should allow no room for gender differences and should guarantee equal access to the procedure. A constant-variable-value vignette study conducted with 799 respondents from a large local government in Poland reveals strong gender effects, that overshadow previously supported positive association between public service motivation and corruption reporting. Namely, despite the confirmed positive association between PSM levels and whistleblowing intentions, highly public service motivated women are less inclined to report a misconduct of their supervisors than men. The socialization context relevant to the study location is discussed in the conclusion.

Prior research suggests the media depict White female victims more sympathetically than their minority counterparts, yet no researcher has yet examined this proposition at the multivariate level. Moreover, prior research on media portrayals generally include White versus non-White or White versus Black comparisons, but no researcher has yet compared media accounts of White, Black, and Latina female victims. Based on critical race feminism, we expected news coverage of White, Black, and Latina victims to vary in key ways. We examined narratives at the bivariate and multivariate levels, and we contextualized findings with story excerpts. Stories about White female victims were more likely to contain sympathetic themes—such as themes of religiosity and reported media attention—and to result in overall sympathetic narratives compared to stories about minority victims, whereas overall narratives about Latina and Black female victims were often unsympathetic. Our findings align with the “ideal victim” stereotype and may help explain the differential treatment of White and minority female victims by the criminal justice system.

Using an institutional framework and critical race and gender theories, this article argues that performances adopted by nonprofits to conform to the legal and economic realities of the sector benefit Whites and men. Economic and legal influences on nonprofits create pressures to conform to the institutions that organize society. Whiteness and Masculinity are two such institutions. After establishing theoretical propositions, the conclusion poses questions to aid in furthering research on Masculinity and Whiteness in nonprofits and undermine the forces frustrating race and gender equity in the nonprofit sector.

Engaging the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s inaugural Federal Work-life Survey (2017), this study deconstructs the gender and race differences in employee satisfaction with federal work-life programs. We examine whether women of color employees in particular stand to benefit differently from the federal work-life programs in comparison to their male and white colleagues. Notably, this study operationalizes the federal employee’s work-life interference and dependent care responsibilities to determine gender and race-related differences in employee satisfaction with federal work-life programs. Study results indicate that federal employees belonging to historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups are satisfied to a lesser extent with partaking in federal work-life programs than their white counterparts.

This study examines differences in turnover intent between men and women with the aim of building a better understanding of factors that contribute to disparities between the sexes and creating more useful recruitment and retention strategies. The study proposes a theoretical framework where personal, human capital, organizational, and structural/community factors contribute to the desire to change jobs. The focus here is on procurement officers as their role is critical in public sector organizations from the local to the federal level. They also are unique in that their skill set is transferable from one organization to another and procurement officers have relatively high opportunities to move both within and between organizations. The study finds that there are important differences in the drivers of turnover intent between men and women and that most differences lie in the personal, human capital, and organizational categories.

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In examining gender dimensions of managerial values, we account for alternative explanations. Specifically, we expect the organization and the profession to be powerful socializing forces that may have similar or larger influence on managerial values. Early public administration work found that bureaucratic organizations can take participants through a process of socialization where they adopt and internalize the central values of the organization (Denhardt, 1968).Organizational controls such as size, number of employees, department, and tenure with the organization are considered as a set of variables that could influence managerial values. Another competing theory is that of professional socialization being a significant influence on managerial values. In the area of professionalization, studies have found that educational and professional experiences can shape value preferences (Edwards, Nalbandian, and Wedel, 1981). Professional variables like MPA degree, membership in professional organization and a professionalism scale are included as explanatory variables. With the consideration of these professional and organizational factors, we question if gender still plays a part in managerial value importance? The data for this study come from Phase IV of the National Administrative Studies Project. The dataset includes United States senior local government managers in communities with populations over 50,000. These senior managers occupy key positions such as city manager, deputy/assistant city manager, public works director, parks and recreation director, planning director, budgeting and finance director. We use responses to how important specific values are to these managers when making decisions about public services for their departments. We expect that managerial value importance will differ amongst men and women even when controlling for professional and organizational factors. Preliminary findings support this hypothesis. We find men and women differ in value importance when making major decisions.

Gender diversity in policing has never been more important than it is today. However, women in state law enforcement are the least noticeable and most underrepresented of all women in policing. Using data from the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) surveys, this study examines gender diversity across the 49 primary state law enforcement agencies in the United States between 2000 and 2016. Although representation varies broadly across the states, the findings are mostly negative and suggest that women in state law enforcement have remained stagnant over the past two decades with very little improvement. This is important because scholarship must continue to bring attention to the underrepresentation of women in law enforcement, regardless of intergovernmental level, and monitor its progress.

In most workplaces, women earn less than their male counterparts. The gender pay gap has multiple, complex, interrelated causes. Federal organizations follow several best practices to work to reduce pay inequity based on gender, but some of these practices risk institutionalizing tendencies toward gendered organizational structures and confounding maleness with the constructions of idealized workers. The National Park Service (NPS) is the context in which these constructs are applied to examine differences in pay based on gender. Collaborating with the NPS Office of Equal Opportunity, anonymized employee-level data were utilized in a regression-based analysis to control for multiple factors influencing pay. The analysis allowed for statistical control for the effects of multiple relevant factors on NPS employee pay—moving beyond descriptive information. The results showed some patterns of gender pay inequity that can be explained by occupational segregation rooted in an understanding of gendered organizations and occupational identities that favor maleness. Concrete applications to address the discrepancies in pay found in the analysis are presented.

Families in the U.S. and other industrialized countries are grappling with the twindilemmas of caring for children when all adults are in the workforce, and of achievinggender equality in the home and in the labor market. In U.S. policy debates, proposedsolutions to these dilemmas often force tradeoffs – to promote child well-being at theexpense of gender equality, or to support gender equality at the expense of children’stime with their parents. In this chapter we argue that government can help promotesolutions to work/family conflicts without tradeoffs through policies that support equal caregiving by mothers and fathers and that distribute the costs of childrearing more broadly. Such policies would allow mothers and fathers to care for their children during the critical first year of life while working for pay part-time or intermittently, to combinemore hours in employment with caregiving during later childhood, and to make use ofhigh quality substitute care during their working hours.

Using a case study of British trade union organizer Margaret Bondfield, this article begins the task of adding a working class perspective to accounts of women’s participation in Progressive era urban reform and expansion of public policy while also showing how international networks of support among trade union women undergirded American reform efforts. The narrative expands the consideration of intersectionality and positionality in analyzing women’s role in developing public administration.

The election of President Obama, the first African American president of the United States, was an historic and symbolically important event that may have influenced the workplace attitudes of minority federal workers, although this question has yet to be tested empirically. Using difference-in-differences analyses of data from the 2008 and 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys, this study explores the influence of Obama’s election on minority employees’ sense of inclusion and job satisfaction in the Department of Education (DoEd) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the two federal agencies with the largest proportion of African American employees. The findings suggest that minority employees in the DoEd and HUD experienced a net increase in their sense of inclusion and job satisfaction after the presidential election. The effect size is small, however, and we found little evidence of an Obama effect across other federal agencies.