Women in Public Administration
| Author | Hindy Lauer Schachter |
| DOI | 10.1177/0095399715611173 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2015
Article
Administration & Society
2017, Vol. 49(1) 143 –158
Women in Public
© The Author(s) 2015
DOI: 10.1177/0095399715611173
Administration: Giving
journals.sagepub.com/home/aas
Gender a Place in
Education for Leadership
Hindy Lauer Schachter1
Abstract
This article explores some aspects of the place of gender in educating public
administrators for leadership, an important component of re-orienting
women’s public sector role. While previous research has examined the
place of gender in the Master of Public Administration (MPA) diversity
and core courses, this study adds to our knowledge by analyzing gender
in popular introductory MPA textbooks and in leadership courses. The
aim is not only to see whether these offerings cover gender issues but
whether they explore such issues only through a legal lens or supplement
that approach with analysis of stereotypes in the gendered workplace—
what management scholars call second-generation bias issues. The
research finds that introductory textbooks and most leadership courses
do not include material on second-generation bias issues. This tendency
is unfortunate as some feminist theorists argue that adding education in
second-generation bias issues to MPA education would help increase the
role of women as leaders.
Keywords
gender, second-generation bias, MPA education, leadership
1New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, USA
Corresponding Author:
Hindy Lauer Schachter, New Jersey Institute of Technology, 4019 Central Avenue Bldg.,
Newark, NJ 01072, USA.
Email: schachte@njit.edu
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Administration & Society 49(1)
This article examines aspects of the place of gender in educating public
administration practitioners for leadership. It defines gender as “an institu-
tionalized system of social practices for constituting males and females as
different in socially significant ways and organizing inequality in terms of
these differences” (Ridgeway, 2001, p. 637).
The goal of Master of Public Administration (MPA) education is to
develop pre-and in-service students’ career skills, abilities, and devotion to
public values. Integrating recent scholarship on gender is important to foster
such development for two reasons. First, all administrators need such infor-
mation to treat clients equitably, whether a given practitioner directly pro-
vides service, develops policy, or reviews its implementation. As
Hewins-Maroney and Williams (2007, p. 36) have argued, if the education of
practitioners “is lacking in cultural competency and diversity issues, then
their ability to deliver responsive public service may be in doubt.”
Second, in the Journal of Public Affairs Education (JPAE), a number of
scholars have argued for enhanced attention to gender issues to increase
administrative leadership roles for women. Although the 21st century has
seen unprecedented career advances for women, they still remain underrep-
resented at high management levels in the economy as a whole and in key
parts of the public sector (Ely, Ibarra, & Kolb, 2011). A few recent articles
examine some of the contours of the problem. Bowling, Kelleher, Jones, and
Wright (2006) found walls around traditionally male dominated positions in
top posts at state agencies handling natural resources, environmental protec-
tion, criminal justice, and transportation. Women are underrepresented as city
managers (Beaty & Davis 2012). They are underrepresented as tenured pub-
lic administration (PA) faculty (Sabharwal, 2013). Alkadry and Tower (2006)
found pay disparities between men and women who held federal procure-
ment positions even when they held jobs at the same level. In addition, they
found that gender correlates with the authority procurement managers have;
women managers are likely to have diminished supervisory responsibilities
(Alkadry & Tower, 2011). Such disparities continue despite increasing evi-
dence that at least in some circumstances, gender representativeness leads to
performance gains (Opstrup & Villadsen, 2015)
Some people argue that a prerequisite to correcting these disparities is to
publicize their existence and the ramifications gender stereotyping has for
public administration. Proponents of this approach have noted that MPA edu-
cation may help correct imbalances through increased attention to the role of
women in administration and understanding how gender affects administra-
tive styles (Burnier, 2005). This approach is based on a long-held assumption
that changing professional education is a prerequisite to shifting the way
practitioners view their roles (Mosher, 1978).
Schachter
145
As educational programs transmit a field’s focus and center of gravity,
examining the place of gender in PA education is an important component of
revisiting women’s role in public administration. Various strategies exist to
learn something about how gender is presented in MPA programs. One
approach is to explore whether MPA programs have developed courses on
gender and which issues such courses cover. In a 2002 article, Janet Mills and
Meredith Newman surveyed Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs,
and Administration (NASPAA) accredited schools and found that only about
a third of programs they investigated had such a course. For a 2007 JPAE
article, Barbara Hewins-Maroney and Ethel Williams found that slightly over
half the programs had a diversity course and that all these courses included
gender as one type of diversity studied. However, because they relied on cata-
logue descriptions rather than syllabi, they could not examine which issues
courses covered.
While a number of educational scholars argue that a stand-alone course on
a particular topic confirms its importance to the field (Hornbein & King
2012; Menzel, 1998; Schachter & Aliaga 2003), limits exist on the influence
such courses have. As such offerings are almost always electives, it may be
that they only attract those students who already care about the particular
issue. As Cooper (1998) argued in regard to ethics courses, we also need to
know whether required offerings consider the topic. The dual approach of
having a separate course and curriculum immersion is probably the most effi-
cacious way for a program to show that it considers a given topic important
for practitioners (Bowman, 1998; Hejka-Ekins, 1998). However, less work
has been done to learn how gender permeates the curriculum as a whole, to
see to what extent instructors integrate gender concerns into a range of offer-
ings, whether the program has a separate course on gender.
This article attempts to add to our knowledge about the status of gender
issues in MPA programs by exploring their place outside diversity courses. It
is in line with Mills and Newman’s (2002) conclusion that as a majority of
programs did not have a gender elective, it is important to study whether
other courses include gender issues.
One methodology the article will use to learn about the place of women’s
issues is to analyze material in some introductory course textbooks. Textbooks
are a primary tool to share what is known about a field. They purport to tell
students which theories and concepts scholars consider important along with
the key intellectual concerns of a field (Stambaugh & Trank, 2010).
In the late 1980s, Schachter (1993) amassed a list of the most frequently used
textbooks in MPA introductory courses. The analysis in this article starts by
reviewing how these textbooks covered gender. It then compares their treatment
of women’s issues with that afforded in later editions of the works published in
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Administration & Society 49(1)
the 21st century. The point is not only to see whether textbooks cover gender
issues to a greater extent today, which is expected, but to learn which aspects of
gender issues they cover, how writers frame gender concerns.
One way textbooks might approach gender issues is through a personnel
management lens. This approach emphasizes legal mandates, for example, the
Equal Pay Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and debates about comparable pay.
The other lens is one that stresses the lived experience of women in public
agencies, what the business management literature calls second-generation
forms of gender bias. These biases include barriers that arise from cultural
beliefs about gender and workplace practices that unintentionally favor men.
The question then becomes, do textbooks present gender as primarily a legal
issue that has to a large extent been “solved” or one that under-girds the daily
routines of organizational behavior (OB)? Jones and Kelan’s (2010) study of
gender in business management programs found that the first approach per-
meated MBA education, yielding a postfeminist understanding that gender
equality or its near equivalent had already arrived. Reacting against this
approach, Graham, Kennavane, and Wears (2008) analysis of diversity in
generic human resource textbooks did not count pages dealing with laws or
court cases as part of a textbook’s diversity coverage. They considered such
material foundational to rather than a part of the behavioral issues which they
thought should be at the core of the field today.
The intersections between gender and leadership are crucial to the behav-
ioral perspective. The JPAE literature posits a potential relationship between
women’s roles as...
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