Public Leaders Are Gendered: Making Gender Visible in Public Affairs Leadership Education

Abstract

For too long, public leadership scholarship has overlooked women as leaders in the United States as well as the gender dimension of leadership. This paper will argue that public affairs leadership education in the United States should become gender inclusive, which would entail teaching leadership scholarship by and about women, examining women’s and men’s concrete leadership experiences in the public sector, and making relational leadership more central to broader disciplinary discussions on public leadership. This paper begins by first gendering the concepts of leader and leadership, and then it describes briefly the debate over whether gender matters in leadership. It then examines the gender and leadership research within public affairs. A pivotal contribution of this research is the emergence of relational leadership, which is examined as a distinct approach to leading. The paper concludes by discussing how gender leadership literature can inform the teaching of public leadership and in particular the author’s own attempt to integrate this scholarly work into a graduate organization theory class.