Despite all the attention that has recently been focused on the ôglass ceilingö problem for women, surprisingly little progress has been made toward integrating women into top administrative positions. This lack of progress is especially true in the public sector, where men continue to dominate management positions in public agencies and even the scope and ideology of the academic field of public administration. This research will examine the significance of gender to the field of public administration, particularly as analyzed through the work of Camilla Stivers, entitled Gender Images in Public Administration: Legitimacy and the Administrative State (1993).
The field of public administration has evolved through American history as a means to offset political scandal and government inefficiency that would be rampant in a political system with no professional bureaucracy. Administrative authority has largely come to be accepted as necessary to accomplish policy objectives and promote important public values. This is indeed the case, but Stivers points out that the way in which public administration has evolved--emphasizing the practices and values of a male culture--has made the field far less useful, perhaps even counter-productive, than it should otherwise be. Several myths have emerged in the field of public administration.
One such myth is that public administration is ôneutralö in terms of values. Gender, the division of labor between the sexes, and the problems women face in organizations have been considered an important focus of organization research since the 1970s. While there is ample evidence that gender inequity is deeply embedded in organizations, many men continue to conceptualize organizations, bureaucracy, and hierarchy as being gender neutral phenomena. Current ideas about administrative competence emphasize a neutral objectivity that depends on separating one's self from the environment and mastering na...