Finding A Voice: Gender and Subjectivity in Public Administration Research and Writing

Abstract

Research and writing on women, research taking a gender perspective, research authored by women, and accounts of women's experiences as public administrators and leaders have been slow to find their way into the literature of public administration. This paper seeks to deepen the current understanding of the gender narrative by examining how and in what ways gender has come to be written into the discipline of American public administration. This paper will ask how American public administration's gender story has unfolded through research and writing, and in answering this question it will use both the metaphor of voice and the concept of narrative. This paper, specifically, will examine gender writing in American public administration from varying perspectives: historical, description/explanation, interpretive, and critique. The author also tells her story about finding her gender voice, in keeping with the personal writing feminist scholars emphasize as a means to interpret one's own experiences. Finally, borrowing from Virginia Woolf (1929), this paper considers whether women have a room of their own in the house of American public administration. It concludes that a "gender room" has been emerging, but it needs to be furnished with more interpretive gender research, including the voices of a wider range of women administrators and employees. Moreover, the critical tools found in that room must be used in the other rooms of public administration research and writing if the discipline is to be transformed.

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