1st Edition
Women and Public Service Barriers, Challenges and Opportunities
This book tackles the challenges that women face in the workplace generally and in the public sector particularly. While Women and Public Service spends time identifying and describing the problems that women faced in the past, it pays special attention to identifying possible remedies to these problems, and also surveys progress made in recent decades. The authors present the challenge of accommodating women in public sector organisations as both a fairness issue and also a human resources matter, as a fundamental prerequisite for recruiting the best and brightest talent.
Key content coverage:
- The representation of women in public organisations, including occupational, agency and position level segregation
- Issues of pay equity--legislation, equal worth measures, and the serious links between the issue of representation and equal pay
- Special issues facing women in their workplace, including institutional climate, workplace violence, sexual harassment, social costs of career progression, and family-friendly policies.
Biography
Alkadry, Mohamad G.; Tower, Leslie E
Alkadry and Tower have brought together in one volume a full range of gender-related issues relevant to public administrators. Practitioners in public and nonprofit organizations need to be aware of these issues, and this book is an important resource for the field.
- Richard C. Box, University of Nebraska at OmahaThe authors inspire us to reflect on the unconscious biases that both men and women hold in gender role expectations in the workplace, thus enabling us to reflect on our own individual roles in the process. The fact that the authors represent both genders makes their unifying argument more compelling.
While promoted as a resource for public administration and public service human resources, this book is an excellent complementary text for social work courses in policy and macro practice. This is a must-read for feminist scholars and those who believe in equality and fairness for women. Alkadry and Tower brilliantly help us to connect the social cost of gender roles to women and the associated costs to families and organizations.
- Victoria A. Anyikwa, Saint Leo UniversityWomen and Public Service contributes to what is a much needed but lacking dialogue about women in government. The discussion is timely, given the sheer volume of women pursuing graduate-level education, and the authors’ approach is succinct.
- Rachel A. Breslin, George Washington UniversityWomen and Public Service by Mohamad Alkadry and Leslie Tower is an important and necessary addition to public administration scholarship. Two significant contributions of this book are, first, its confident normative voice and, second, its rejection of the American exceptionalism implicit in public administration research originating in the US. These are the strengths of Women and Public Service.
- Sharon MastracciIt is heartening to see a book on women’s employment issues being presented by a male and female team—Mohamad Alkadry and Leslie Tower (the authors).
Women in Public Service: Barriers, Challenges, and Opportunities is a must-read for public administration practitioners and a must-assign for students of human resources management. As noted by the authors, “public administration students at all levels and public sector employees at all levels should have an understanding about the issues that we raise” (Alkadry & Tower, 2014,p. xi).
- Margaret Stout, West Virginia University
