Reimagining race and gender in public administration and public policy: Insights from an interdisciplinary systematic review

• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Author: Sanjay K. Pandey,Amy E. Smith,Sheela Pandey,Olanike A. Ojelabi
• Date: 01 January 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13570

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Reimagining race and gender in public administration

and public policy: Insights from an interdisciplinary

systematic review

Sanjay K. Pandey

1

| Amy E. Smith

2

| Sheela Pandey

3

| Olanike A. Ojelabi

2

1

Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public

Administration, George Washington University,

Washington, District of Columbia, USA

2

McCormack Graduate School of Policy and

Global Studies, University of Massachusetts

Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

3

School of Business Administration,

Pennsylvania State University Harrisburg,

Middletown, Pennsylvania, USA

Correspondence

Sanjay K. Pandey, Trachtenberg School of Public

Policy and Public Administration, George

Washington University, Washington DC, USA.

Email: skpandey@gwu.edu;sanjay.k.pandey@

gmail.com

Abstract

Public administration scholarship on race and gender is motivated by normative

concerns about social equity, and dominated by work on bureaucracy and its rep-

resentativeness. Despite decades of research on race and gender in public admin-

istration, there has been limited engagement with racializing and gendering

processes. Relatedly, scant attention is paid to other disciplines that center on race

and gender in theorizing. The purpose of this review is to explore public adminis-

tration scholarship on race and gender in the context of allied social science disci-

plines, reveal limits of current approaches in public administration, and articulate

strategies for enhancing understanding of race and gender in public administra-

tion scholarship. We use bibliometric and content analysis methods to map the

intellectual structure of social science scholarship on race and gender, highlight

public administration’s place in this structure, and compare public administration

scholarship on race and gender with other social science disciplines.

Evidence for Practice

•Notions of racial equity and gender equity grounded in numerical terms, such as

proportions or absolute numbers, are insufficient. It is incumbent that we look

behind these numerical portraits to figure out how organizational and societal

structures create, sustain, and exacerbate racial inequity and gender inequity.

•Day-to-day workplace interactions matter—practitioners need to develop an

understanding of how race and gender are constructed through day-to-day

interactions in workplaces.

•Theoretical frameworks according centrality to race, gender, and intersectional-

ity should be mainstream frameworks in professional training for those working

in public sector organizations.

•Practitioners should examine whether social equity policy initiatives are race-

aware and gender-aware.

INTRODUCTION

Public administration scholarship has a sustained history of

engagement with race and gender. The concept of social

equity has been the primary lever for this engagement, with

scholars using evocative structural metaphors, such as pillar

and foundation, to signal social equity’s central role in public

administration scholarship on race and gender (Blessett

et al., 2019; Cepiku & Mastrodascio, 2021; Frederickson, 1974;

Gooden 2015a,2015b;Guy&McCandless,2012). Scholars

credit social equity scholarship for provid ing a “normative

platform”to study race and gender as two primary axes

of inequities (Gooden, 2015a;Guy&McCandless,2012).

Gooden’s(

2015a, p. 375) review of five decades of

scholarship on social equity in Public Administration

Review (PAR) notes that “scholarship that includes an

equity focus on race/ethnicity and/or gender is concen-

trated in the area of representative bureaucracy.”Other

reviews confirm the dominance of representative

bureaucracy theory and its powerful influence on the

worldview informing public administration scholarship

on race, gender, and social equity (e.g., Bishu &

Received: 23 January 2022 Revised: 15 October 2022 Accepted: 21 October 2022

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13570

14 © 2022 American Society for Public Administration. Public Admin Rev. 2023;83:14–34.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar

Kennedy, 2020;Blessettetal.,2019; Sabharwal

et al., 2018).

Thus, social equity literature provides a helpful,

but an inadequate understanding of the endemic and

variegated social hierarchies constituted by race and

gender. This is because public administration theories

on social equity have largely ignored substantial bod-

iesofliteraturethatputraceandgenderatthecenter

of their theorizing. There is comparatively greater

focus on the bureaucratic context and limited atten-

tion is paid to racializing and gendering processes

(Bishu & Kennedy, 2020;Gooden,2015a; Pandey, Bear-

field, & Hall, 2022). This incomplete understanding

and appreciation of race and gender go beyond pub-

lic administration social equity theories. Public admin-

istration literature at large, with a keen focus on

bureaucracy as the object of analysis, has not

engaged with the full complexity of race and gender

as social institutions.

Indeed, a number of scholars question the effectiveness

of public administration and closely related disciplines in

addressing theoretical as well as policy and administration

challenges pertaining to race and gender (Alexander, 1997;

Alexander & Stivers, 2010; Bearfield, 2009;Carey&

Dickinson, 2015; Hutchinson & Mann, 2004;Witt,2011).

Gooden’s(

2015b) characterization of racial equity as a ner-

vous area of government provides insight into possible rea-

sons behind the lack of deeper engagement with race.

Relatedly, others point out that not enough scholarly energy

is expended in examining the relationship between raciali-

zation and structural inequalities (Blessett et al., 2019;Pan-

dey, Bearfield, & Hall, 2022;Portilloetal.,2020; Williams &

Duckett, 2020). Carey and Dickinson (2015) similarly point to

the limited use of feminist theories in public management

andcharacterizethismissedopportunityasa“silence”(also

see Hutchinson & Mann, 2004). In a recent study of gender

imbalance in public sector leadership, DeHart-Davis et al.

(2020) highlight the nonproductive use of theories in

advancing liberatory agendas, and advocate instead for a

problem-oriented approach.

Of course, the historical legacy of public administra-

tion scholarship has and continues to exercise a profound

influence on contemporary scholarship and practice.

1

Academic public administration, forged in the crucible of

progressive era, had notable women and men contribu-

tors (Stivers, 1995). Historical accounts of public adminis-

tration, however, render women’s contribution invisible

and paint gender stereotypical accounts of public admin-

istration as men’s work. Stivers (1995, p. 523) makes this

point eloquently, “…what sense we have today of the

history of the field of public administration traces its ori-

gins to the proceduralism of the bureau men, rather than

to the openly substantive approaches of settlement resi-

dents and reform club members, so many of whom were

women.”The domineering influences of maleness and

whiteness are pervasive (Bhati, 2022; Moloney et al., 2022;

Portillo et al., 2022).

Indeed, much of what is taught as part of the canon

of intellectual history of public administration scholar-

ship is dominated by references to Woodrow Wilson,

Leonard White, Frank Goodnow, William Willoughby,

Dwight Waldo, Frederick Mosher, and other White and

predominantly male scholars (Roberts, 2020;

Stivers, 1995). Relatedly, the work of scholars such as

W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, Lillian Gilbreth, and Mary

Parker Follett has received far less attention (Klobus

et al., 2022;Shields&Elias,2022;Sullivan,1995). Put-

ting the whiteness of public administration scholarship

and practice in a global perspective, Roberts (2020)

describes colonial administrations’drive to “civilize”

people of other nations, during a period overlapping

with the progressive era in the United States. This drive

was powered by a belief among the western intellec-

tual classes in the US and Europe that colonization was

both a right and obligation of White nations to bring

civilization to other races. Recently, a number of

scholars have highlighted different aspects of this

racializedandgenderedlegacy,andhowthislegacy

continues to shape the United States and rest of the

world during the present times (Bhati, 2022;

Martínez, 2022; Moloney et al., 2022; Portillo

et al., 2022; Roberts, 2020).

The purpose of our interdisciplinary systematic

review of public administration and related disciplines

is to explore the rich epistemic context of scholarship

on race and gender and how this context, understood

in terms of disparate disciplines, shapes substantive

understanding of race and gender.

2

We explore how

knowledge of race and gender in public administration

is related to and different from knowledge of race and

gender in allied knowledge domains in the social sci-

ences. A word about public administration and adja-

cent social science disciplines is in order here. Although

contemporary public administration scholars are likely

to see themselves as having an interdisciplinary orien-

tation, this interdisciplinarity, however, remains a work

in progress. Nearly 50 years ago, Henry (1975,p.384)

characterized public administration thus, “With a plu-

rality of public administration programs still being con-

ducted in political science departments, we can infer

that political science currently dominates the field

intellectually as well as institutionally”.Perryand

Mee (2022, p. 30) describe the gradual shift in the insti-

tutional locus of public administration thus, “Academic

entities primarily housed in a single discipline, political

science, became more multidisciplinary and ultimately

interdisciplinary.”Our review includes seven related

social science disciplines/areas of inquiry with a good

mix of proximal disciplines (e.g., Political Science with

close historical ties to public administration) and distal

disciplines (e.g., Sociology with comparatively less

interaction with public administration), including areas

of inquiry that center on race and gender as primary

theoretical concerns.

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW 15