A Retrospective Analysis of Scholarship on Gender and Diversity in Public Administration

Abstract

At its heart, public administration is about life in community. In order to live up to the normative democratic ideal, the public service workspace must strive for a representative bureaucracy. This is because an ideal government reflects the constituency it serves. Accordingly, we focus on the themes of gender and diversity to comprehend their effect on policies, programs, and outcomes. This paper provides a retrospective analysis of the literature on gender and diversity to demonstrate how the focus on differentness has evolved over the past forty years. Topics are presented thematically and illustrate how the concept of diversity has adapted and expanded to include multiple dimensions such as age, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and physical ability. In the public management literature, the transition from exclusion to inclusion for women and minorities has been gradual, but has progressed from being thought of as a challenge to being treated as a benefit in the delivery of public services.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.