Women in the American Society for Public Administration: Another Decade of Progress But Still a Way to Go

The role of women in the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) has evolved dramatically during the Society's 60-year history, from virtual invisibility, to token representation, to major participation. This evolution mirrors, to a large degree, changes in the economic and political status of women in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the last 10 to 15 years. The objective of this article is to examine women's evolving role in ASPA during the 1990s. The analysis updates an earlier assessment by the author on women's status in ASPA during the Society's first 50 years, 1939-1989 (Rubin 1990). This update shows that women have continued to increase their proportion of membership in the organization and have achieved full participation in the governance of ASPA during the 1990s. However, the update also shows that women have not yet achieved parity with their male colleagues in scholarly contributions to public administration. At the time of ASPA's founding 60 years ago, 28 percent of adult women in the United States were part of the nation's civilian labor force. Women who were employed outside of the home generally held jobs as clerk-typists, secretaries, nurses, and teachers--all "helping" professions. By 1999, the proportion of adult women in the labor force more than doubled its 1940 level to 60 percent. In the 1990s, women were employed not only in the helping professions, but also in jobs previously filled only by men, such as: police officers, astronauts, and generals in the armed forces. Women served as presidents of public and private universities and not-for-profit organizations and as chief executive officers of major corporations such as Hewlett Packard and Mattel. Even Blondie now has a career after spending decades in her kitchen making sandwiches for Dagwood. And Barbie has career clothes. In the political realm, women also made progress during the 1990s. In 1999, women held statewide elected executive offices across the U.S., with women filling 28 percent of available positions (CAWP 1999). This compares with 7 percent in 1969 and just 13 percent as recently as 1988. Women held 65 of the 535 seats in the 106th U.S. Congress (1999-2001)--nine of the 100 seats in the Senate and 56 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. This representation is obviously far below the percentage of the electorate composed of women (53 percent). But female representation in the 106th Congress was more than double that in the 100th Congress (25 women in 1987-89) and 7 times that in the 77th Congress (10 women in 1939-41). In spite of the economic and political progress that women made in the 1990s, they continue to be underrepresented in many occupations and industries, holding relatively few of the highly visible decision-making positions in both the public and private sectors. Women in ASPA: The Framework In ASPA, the evolving role of women can be examined within the historical framework established by Darrell Pugh in Looking Back--Moving Forward (1988). Pugh divides the history of the Society into five periods: 1) the formative years (1939-1955); 2) the pursuit of independence (1955-1963); 3) the maturation of ASPA and public administration (1964-1972); 4) new directions (1972-1980); and 5) a decade of doubts (1980s). The assessment of women's evolving role in ASPA during these five periods was presented in this author's 1990 PAR article (Rubin, 1990). The current article provides an update of women's progress in ASPA in the 1990s, in what might be called the Society's sixth period--reinvention and restructuring. Following the template of the 1990 article, the progress of women in ASPA during the 1990s is traced using two indicators. The first tracks women's membership in the Society and in its governance; the second tracks the involvement of women in ASPA's ongoing efforts to support the improvement of public administration through research and scholarship. …