Women, Research, and Mentorship in Public Administration

Abstract

Women's struggle for acceptance in the field of public administration is an on-going concern in both the academic and practitioner worlds. It is well documented that women have made progress in securing careers in the public service, and these successes seem to facilitate the entry of additional women into managerial and leadership positions (Lewis, 1988; Saltzstein, 1986). As promising as these findings are, the overall number and proportion of women-to-men in the public service remain disproportionately low, especially for managerial, decision-making, and top-level positions (Naff, 1994; Guy, 1993; Rubin, 1990). Less documented is women's involvement in professional public service-related organizations, like the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA), which can be an important mechanism for providing a variety of career development and advancement opportunities in public administration. Although the role of women is addressed to some degree in Pugh's (1988) history of the society, only in one recent study is it the primary focus of analysis. Rubin's (1990) examination of the status of women in ASPA offers both good and bad news. While having made major gains in leadership and participation throughout ASPA, women have not been as successful as their male counterparts in contributing to a more thorough understanding of our field as measured by publication in the Public Administration Review (PAR). The primary concern of Rubin's study was the role of women in ASPA, rather than the impact of women on public administration research.(1) Because of the potential consequences to the status of women in the society and in the profession of public service, we believe that the role of women in shaping the conduct of inquiry in the field merits further and more detailed analysis. The purpose of this project, therefore, is to expand upon Rubin's observations, probe into the patterns of research conducted by women, and analyze some of the possible explanations for the level and nature of scholarly contributions made by women. Methodology Scholarly contributions to public administration can be made through a variety of avenues. In addition to hooks and monographs, the field of public administration has witnessed a proliferation of high-quality, refereed journals in the last three decades. For this particular project, we choose to focus on one journal, Public Administration Review. It is the official journal of ASPA, and it is regarded by most practitioners and academics as the field's premier general readership journal-of-record. It also ranks very high in terms of impact on academia (Garand, 1990). As such, PAR attracts and publishes manuscripts that address a great diversity of topics (Watson and Montjoy, 1991; Perry and Kraemer, 1986; Stallings and Ferris, 1988). It also attracts manuscripts from a wide variety of settings throughout the United States and abroad. Contributing authors are affiliated with institutions at all levels of government, the private sector, nonprofit organizations, as well as large research universities and small liberal arts colleges. All regular and special issues, as well as symposia, in volumes 1 through 55 (1940-1995) were included in this study. We concentrated our efforts on research-based articles, which we define eclectically as all articles published in PAR, with the exception of introductory pieces, commentaries and editorials, correspondences, book reviews and book review essays, and pieces written for the TOPS (Those Other Publications) section. These kinds of articles were excluded from analysis, The research design consisted of recording the gender and institutional affiliation of each author. In the case of a female author, the article's topic was also reviewed. Findings A total of 3,352 research-based articles were published in PAR during the 56 years under examination. More than 88 percent (2,959) of the articles were authored by men, and slightly more than 7 percent (248) were written exclusively by women. …