Glass Walls and Glass Ceilings: Women's Representation in State and Municipal Bureaucracies

GLASS WALLS AND GLASS CEILINGS: Women’s Representation in State and Municipal Bureaucracies Margaret F. Reid Brinck Ker...

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GLASS WALLS AND GLASS CEILINGS: Women’s Representation in State and Municipal Bureaucracies

Margaret F. Reid Brinck Kerr Will Miller

PRAEGER

Glass Walls and Glass Ceilings

GLASS WALLS AND GLASS CEILINGS Women’s Representation in State and Municipal Bureaucracies

Margaret F. Reid, Brinck Kerr, and Will Miller

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reid, Margaret F. Glass walls and glass ceilings : women’s representation in state and municipal bureaucracies / Margaret F. Reid, Brinck Kerr, and Will Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97195–3 (alk. paper) 1. Women in the civil service—United States—States. 2. Minority municipal officials and employees—United States. I. Kerr, Brinck. II. Miller, Will. III. Title. JK2482.W6R45 2003 331.481352130973–dc21 2003048211 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2003 by Margaret F. Reid, Brinck Kerr, Will Miller All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: ISBN: 0–275–97195–3

2003048211

First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10

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CONTENTS

Tables

vii

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments 1. 2.

Representation of Women in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Empirical and Normative Dimensions

xiii

1

Barriers to the Representation of Women in State and Municipal Public Bureaucracies: Theoretical Foundations and Previous Empirical Work

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3.

Data, Variables, Measures, and Method

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4.

Empirical Analysis of Glass Walls in Municipal and State Bureaucracies

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Empirical Analysis of Glass Ceilings and Sex-Based Salary Disparities in Municipal and State Bureaucracies

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Bureaucratic Representation of Latinas, African American Women, and White (Non-Hispanic) Women in Multiethnic U.S. Cities

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Conclusion: Interaction between Glass Walls and Ceilings, Future Research, and Policy Implications

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5. 6.

7.

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CONTENTS

Appendix

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References

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Index

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TABLES

4.1

4.2 4.3

4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3

Indicators of Municipal Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators Indicators of Municipal Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Professionals Indicators of State Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators Indicators of State Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Professionals Strength of Glass Walls in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Officials and Administrators Strength of Glass Walls in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Professionals Indicators of Municipal Level Glass Ceilings by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators Indicators of Municipal Level Sex-Based Salary Disparities by Year and Functional Area: Professionals Indicators of State Level Glass Ceilings by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators

54 59

62 67 70 71 77 81 85

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5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

6.2

7.1

TABLES

Indicators of State Level Sex-Based Salary Disparities by Year and Functional Area: Professionals Strength of Glass Ceilings in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Officials and Administrators Extent of Sex-Based Salary Disparities by Year and Functional Area: Professionals Municipal Employment Proportionality by Sex, Ethnic Group, and Department: Mean and Median Representativeness Ratios for Administrative Positions Municipal Employment Proportionality by Sex, Ethnic Group, and Department: Mean and Median Representativeness Ratios for Professional Positions Comparison of Walls and Ceilings at the State and Municipal Levels (Officials and Administrators, 1997)

88 92 93

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102 112

PREFACE

In one jurisdiction an emergency medical services (EMS) supervisor suggested that an EMS employee have an abortion to keep her job; employment offers from the same jurisdiction’s fire chief required as a condition of employment that women take a pregnancy test prior to appointment (Garza, 2001). An African American female employed by a state government hospital complained that she was passed over for promotion—and the job given to a light-skinned male—because of retaliation for an earlier complaint that she had filed against her employer (Velliquette 2002). Some blame events such as these on personalities, some on the system and still others on economic factors. But to women who are aware of these incidents a primary consideration is that people who looked and acted like them were not well represented in these agencies. While many other scholarly works have focused on the legitimate concerns of employment economics (labor pool availability, equal compensation, and so on), our focus is on the representation of women in public bureaucracies, bureaucracies that are responsible for implementing and making public policy. For public bureaucracies, the issue of representation is critical for the democratic legitimacy of these public agencies in the eyes of their various constituent groups. As more women than ever complete college degrees and enter the workforce, and as women begin to occupy an increasing percentage of middleand upper-level management positions in all workforce settings, questions arise as to why a significant segment of highly skilled female professionals and administrators do not seem to be able to advance into the highest and

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PREFACE

most prestigious positions in public sector organizations. Despite three decades of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity policies, women continue to encounter structural and cultural barriers that render the employment and advancement of female managers more difficult compared to their male counterparts. Moreover, pay disparities resulting from such barriers have further cemented economic disadvantages experienced by many women. Many empirical studies of the distribution of women and men in public sector employment, and of the integration of women into the administrative ranks, provide evidence that women face glass ceilings and glass walls at all levels of government. The term “glass wall” is a metaphor that applies to occupational segregation attributed to barriers that restrict the access of women to certain types of jobs (or agencies) or that trap them within certain types of jobs (or agencies). By contrast, the “glass ceiling” is a metaphor for barriers that restrict or block the access of women to high-level administrative positions within their agency. Because the relevant federal employment data are relatively easy to access, research on glass walls and ceilings at the federal level is fairly well-developed. On the other hand, the literature on state and municipal level bureaucracies is far less developed, largely because the lack of easily accessible, comprehensive data on state and municipal employment has made such research a cumbersome and very expensive effort. Consequently, most of the academic work in this area has been confined to single cities or states, to small samples of governmental units from selected regions of the country, or to data sources that combine state and local government employment statistics into single state-level pools. Still other research relies on case studies, which provide a rich source of information on single agencies and are of heuristic value, but nevertheless fail to provide an empirical basis from which to generalize to other units of governments. This book is intended to redress the lack of systematic, generalizable research on women’s representation in state and municipal bureaucracies by focusing specifically on female managers (or the lack thereof) in highlevel policy and decision-making positions in their agencies or departments. Our primary interest is in examining the distribution of women and men in state and municipal administrative and professional positions by agency and over time (from 1987 through 1997) in order to determine if (1) agency missions are associated with glass walls and glass ceilings and (2) relative to white women, women of minority ethnic background have made progress in laying claim to a greater share of managerial positions in public sector agencies. In this book we employ an extensive data set obtained from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

PREFACE

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(EEOC) to investigate sex- and ethnic-based employment patterns at the managerial level in many state and municipal government agencies over time. Chapter 1 presents our research questions, justifies their importance, and provides a brief synopsis of the employment conditions of women in (1) the general labor force, and (2) state and municipal government bureaucracies. Chapter 2 discusses the theoretical foundations for our data analysis and posits hypotheses for empirical testing. Chapter 3 discusses the data, research methods, and measures we employ to identify the existence and extent of glass walls, glass ceilings, and sex-ethnic underrepresentation. Chapter 4 presents our findings on glass walls in state and municipal bureaucracies. Chapter 5 presents our findings on glass ceilings in state and municipal bureaucracies. Chapter 6 examines the extent of representational inequalities between Latinas, African American women, and white (non-Hispanic) women in managerial positions in over 100 multiethnic cities. Chapter 7 summarizes our findings, discusses the relationship between glass walls and glass ceilings, offers suggestions for future research, and discusses the policy implications of our research findings with an emphasis on agenda setting.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

During the course of writing this book we collaborated extensively on virtually every aspect of our research—from theory construction to data analysis/interpretation to drawing conclusions from the research. Each chapter was circulated and rewritten numerous times, with three authors an often confusing and laborious process. We say this to emphasize that this book is a joint effort in the truest sense of the word. In other words, the order of names on the title page is not meant to imply that any one person’s contribution is greater than another’s. Our research on glass walls and glass ceilings has benefited greatly from what can only be described as an equal division of labor. (We accumulated a number of debts, most of which can never be repaid.) We wish to thank Dr. Ronald Edwards of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Dr. Edwards has been a consistent, unselfish source of sound advice and encouragement over the past few years. Without his help this book would not have been possible. We also wish to thank the EEOC’s Office of Research, Information, and Planning, which generously provided most of the data for this study. We appreciate the support of various administrative units at the University of Arkansas, including the Center for the Study of Representation, the Department of Political Science, the interdisciplinary Public Policy Ph.D. program, the Graduate School, and the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Teresa Taylor provided valuable support and research help in the project. The 2002 policy-agenda seminar provided valuable feedback on the final chapter of this book. Finally, and most importantly, we thank our families for their patience and understanding over the past two years.

Chapter 1

REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN STATE AND MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES: EMPIRICAL AND NORMATIVE DIMENSIONS

In this chapter we begin by presenting a general portrait of women’s employment in the various sectors of the labor force. This is followed by a short introduction to women’s participation in administrative and professional positions in public sector bureaucracies. Next, we introduce the central questions that we examine in the book, questions that provide an important basis for understanding barriers to women’s full representation in public sector agencies. We then address the normative dimensions of research on representative bureaucracy, and justify the importance of examining the employment progress of women in state and municipal bureaucracies. At the end of the chapter, we present a brief overview of the literature reporting general trends in women’s public sector employment in federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies. From the outset we wish to emphasize that even though bureaucratic accountability has often been defined as a hierarchical formal-legal concept, Burke and many others argue that accountability should include “a democratically grounded conception of responsibility” (Burke 1986, 39). Likewise, Dicke and Ott (1999) suggest that accountability is not limited strictly to the legality of actions. They argue that accountability is also a moral, professional, and ethical construct that has implicit consequences for the actions of public officials. Moral, professional and ethical behavior influences bureaucratic behavior and policy, and is shaped both by the individual bureaucrat as well as by the groups to which the individual belongs. Therefore it is important that the values and interests of various

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GLASS WALLS AND GLASS CEILINGS

groups or constituencies are represented through the demographic composition of a public bureaucracy. This book explores how well women are represented in various types of state and local bureaucracies. WOMEN’S LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION IN MANAGERIAL RANKS: EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS IN PRIVATE, NON-PROFIT, AND PUBLIC SECTORS The participation of women in private, public, and non-profit sector jobs has increased dramatically over the last few decades (Gittleman and Howell 1995; Hayghe 1997). From the 1950s to the early 1990s, the proportion of women employed in the general work force has increased from 32 percent to about 60 percent. From 1975 to 1996 alone, the participation of women in the general work force increased from 46 to 59 percent while that of men decreased from 82 to 75 percent. In the 1990s, 60 percent of all new service workers were female (Steiger and Wardell 1995; Bernstein and Mishel 1997; Hayghe 1997). In the last two decades, Burbridge (1994) reports that the proportion of white women in the labor market increased by a third, and the number of minorities doubled. Despite increases in the number of women in the general work force, significant disparities continue in the distribution of job opportunities for women. Female participation in managerial ranks has grown slowly. According to Reskin and McBrier (2000, 213): “For the first 60 years of the century, women’s share of managerial and administrative jobs grew by just ten percentage points, to one manager in seven in 1960 (Powell 1993, 21; U.S. Census Bureau 1943, table 26; 1956, table l; 1963, table 2).” Although the percent of female managers has generally increased, the distribution of female managers across occupational fields and different types of managerial positions remains under-researched. The proportion of women to men in managerial positions varies according to location in the private, non-profit, or public sector, though all sectors of the economy fall short of equal participation. The picture is bleakest in the private sector, especially when we consider the positions held by nonwhite females. According to Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory organization working to advance women’s interests in the private sector, 18 percent of the Fortune 500 companies continue to count no women among their corporate officers in 2000; women of color account for 1.3 percent of corporate officers in the 400 companies for which Catalyst successfully obtained data on race/ethnicity. This percentage is unchanged from 1999. Women of color represent 10.3 percent of total female officers

REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN

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(134 out of 1,297) but only six non-white women are top earners. More than 83 percent of the Fortune 500 companies lack a woman among their five highest earning officers (Catalyst 2000). In response to the many reports documenting women’s difficulties in achieving access to top-management positions, Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (Public Law 102–166), known as the “Glass Ceiling Act of 1991,” specifically addressed concerns about the scarcity of women and minorities in private sector management and decision-making positions, and the need to remove barriers to their advancement. The Act established the Glass Ceiling Commission to study and make recommendations aimed at the elimination of such barriers and the creation of opportunities to advance women and minorities into management. The law referenced only the private sector. Unlike both the for-profit and public sector, of the approximately nine million paid employees working in the nonprofit sector in the mid-1990s, over two-thirds of the employees were women. Despite the predominance of female employees and volunteers in nonprofit organizations, research indicates that compared to men there are fewer women serving as chief executive officers and board members (Pynes 2000). Collecting data on nonprofits is difficult due to the lack of uniformly defined and comprehensive data bases, but surveys indicate that women most often work in the direct service areas of nonprofit agencies (Gibelman 2000). In this book we focus on public sector employment, specifically on the lack of women’s access to public sector managerial positions in state and municipal bureaucracies. Ballard and Lawn-Day (1992) report that the distribution of women in high-ranking managerial positions in governmental agencies varies widely among levels of government, and that increases in women’s employment at the federal level have largely come in professional rather than administrative positions. The same authors also report that at the state level, women’s gains tend to be confined to agencies with an already female-dominated workforce. The greatest gains, according to Ballard and Lawn-Day, were at the local level, the level of government that, on average, is likely to pay lower salaries, have less generous benefit packages, and provide limited policy making power and discretion to bureaucrats. Extant research has identified a number of structural and cultural barriers that women are likely to encounter in workplaces. These barriers slow women’s integration into high-level managerial and policy-relevant positions in the public sector as well as the private sector. Epstein (1988), for example, provides evidence that employers deem certain jobs appropriate

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or inappropriate for women or men, or for members of particular ethnic groups. Women are channeled into traditional roles regardless of their educational attainment. Women performing the same tasks as men tend to be classified in lower positions (Gottfried 1988). Thus, labor market segmentation by type of occupation is further reinforced within organizations (Pfeffer and Cohen 1984). King (1993), who discusses this phenomenon for black women, maintains that the U.S. labor market is one in which a race and gender hierarchy operates through occupational segregation. Occupational segregation by gender has remained nearly constant over the last 50 years, with the exception of decreases in the 1970s. Nearly 60 percent of either women or men would have had to change jobs to achieve equal representation by gender in all occupations in 1988. According to Bielby and Baron (1986), over three-quarters of the employees in their study of California firms in 1979 worked in private sector establishments, establishments where between 96 and 100 percent of women and men worked in job classifications that included only members of their own sex. Hale and Kelly (1989a) in a review of the public sector women’s employment literature identify three types of workplace impediments: (1) internal (personal) barriers such as biases, socialization patterns, or an individual’s self-concept; (2) structural barriers such as sex-segregated jobs, lack of remedies for addressing sexual harassment, lack of promotional opportunities, pay inequities or lack of employer commitment to greater participation of women in upper-management positions, or lack of workplace policies that deal with women’s specific domestic obligations; and (3) organizational culture barriers such as lack of mentors, role models and access to formal and informal support networks, selected offerings of promotional opportunities to men and women, or lack of resources devoted to training and education. THE RESEARCH QUESTIONS The purpose of this book is to examine employment at the managerial level in state and municipal government bureaucracies. We examine the following research questions: (a) Is sex-based occupational segregation in U.S. state and municipal bureaucracies (glass walls) related to the policy missions and/or organizational cultures of agencies and departments?; (b) Are impediments to female representation in the highest level administrative posts (glass ceilings) in state and municipal bureaucracies related to policy missions and/or organizational cultures of agencies and departments?; (c) Has the character of glass walls and glass ceilings changed


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over time in state and municipal bureaucracies?; and (d) In what ways do the public sector employment patterns for Latinas, African American women, and white (non-Hispanic) women differ at the managerial level? THE IMPORTANCE OF REPRESENTATIVE BUREAUCRACY: NORMATIVE CONSIDERATIONS AND JUSTIFICATIONS Equal employment opportunity is an important issue for the private, nonprofit and the public sectors. Blau and Ferber (1992), in their discussion of general workforce participation, argue that gender integration may change people’s expectations about working women. In another discussion of the general workforce, Jacobs (1989, 1992) argues that as women become more integrated into their organizations they will have increased access to positions of power and authority. In all sectors the impact of women in the workforce is important, but it may be most important in the public sector. In the context of the public sector, the equitable distribution of employment opportunities and resources is of special significance because the public sector is expected to represent the interests of women. Organizational structure and culture both present barriers that result in occupational segregation for women and ethnic minorities in the public sector and deny them equitable representation of their viewpoints across all types of agencies (glass walls). Within these agencies, woman are effectively hindered in their advancement to higher level administrative and policy making positions (glass ceilings), thereby denying members of traditionally disadvantaged groups access to administrative power. Although we fully explore the empirical dimensions of glass walls and ceilings in chapter 2, in this chapter we wish to discuss the importance of including more women among the managerial ranks in public sector agencies. Participation by women in public management is important for women and for the public sector agencies in which they serve. Numerous authors argue that women bring a different perspective to public policy problems (for example, Carroll, Dodson, and Mandel 1991; Brudney, Hebert, and Wright 2000). Indeed, important benefits may result from the increased representation of women in the upper echelons of American bureaucracies, including symbolic benefits (MacManus 1981; Tolleson-Rinehart 1991; Guy 1993; Berman 1997) and changes in representation and leadership processes (Gilligan 1982; Beck 1991, 1995; Kelly, Hale, and Burgess 1991; Tolleson-Rinehart 1991). Kelly, Hale, and Burgess, in their study of Arizona public administrators, for example, found that women use power,

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supervise subordinates, and interrelate differently than men in their managerial work. Similarly, Guy (1993) observed that women and men have different perceptions of their work, of the power structures in which they manage, and the degree to which they have made progress to advance to the highest decision making positions in their organizations. So in times when flexibility and innovation are increasingly important, having women in management can be a great asset for agencies. Organizational development stimulated by diversity of perspectives can help an agency to overcome inertial forces inherent in all organizations. The diversity that women and other underrepresented groups bring to an organization can be seen as a vehicle for organizational regeneration, a factor that has been largely overlooked in representativeness discussions in the public administration and political science literatures (Sigelman and Dometrius 1986; Dometrius and Sigelman 1997; Cohen, Broschak, and Haveman 1998; Kelly and Amburgey 1991). As early as the late 1970s, Blau noted that organizational regeneration and change is often the result of frequent interactions of organizational members in heterogeneous settings (Blau 1977; Blau and Schwartz 1984; South et al. 1982). Some authors, for example, have suggested that female managers tend to favor transformational leadership styles, styles that are conducive to change, encourage participation and, in turn, encourage employees to look beyond their own selfinterest (Bass and Avolio 1994). The organizational theory literature has discussed for several decades the inability of organizations to find a fit with their environments. This lack of ability to adapt leads to perverted goals and structural arrangements and will often result in unresponsiveness to clients’ needs (Stivers 1994; Behn 2001). However, if organizations are to benefit from the transformational assets women and ethnic minorities offer, organizations must first engage in deliberate (strategic) decisions that prioritize the hiring, nurturing and promotion of women and ethnic minorities even if, in some cases, this requires postponement of other goals. Then, as we argue in the final chapter of the book, representation must be on our national agenda and organizations must be committed to institutionalizing such practices/policies. We now turn our attention to issues of constituency representation and legitimacy. Due in part to the differential effects women have on the internal operation of bureaucracies, the presence of women is likely to shape the impact of the agency on the constituency it serves. Previous research strongly suggests that the presence of women in high-level administrative posts may change the direction of policy outputs (Mezey 1978; Merritt 1980; Stewart 1980; Stanwick and Kleeman 1983; Welch 1985; Shapiro


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1986; Beck 1991; Carroll, Dodson, and Mandel 1991; Dodson and Carroll 1991; Tolleson-Rinehart 1991; Welch and Thomas 1991; Thomas 1994; Conway, Ahren, and Steuernagel 1995; Vega and Firestone 1995). Some findings from this burgeoning literature are particularly relevant for state and local settings. Women, for instance, have different attitudes than men toward childcare and zoning (Beck 1991). They are more likely than men to specialize in the area of social concerns (Merritt 1980) and to give priority to health care issues (Carroll, Dodson, and Mandel 1991). Also, based on a survey of several local commissions on the status of women, Stewart found that employment and education—two highly valued goods in contemporary society—were the two most important agenda items for women. Truly representative bureaucracies are central to a polity built on the equitable and just treatment of its citizens. Levitan’s statement of sixty years ago still rings true today (1943, 359). He argues, That ‘administration must have a soul’. . . . that a democratic state must be not only based on democratic principles but also democratically administered . . . that administrative procedures . . . must therefore be constantly reexamined in terms of the ends they serve, and changed when the changing social and economic milieu requires different means to different ends.

This quote echoes our earlier statement acknowledging bureaucracies’ role as a co-policy making body with legislatures and rejects the notion of a strictly hierarchical (superordinate-subordinate) relationship between legislatures and bureaucracies—a conceptualization that inevitably invites the much maligned and often misunderstood politics-administration dichotomy. As Rourke (1984) maintains, bureaucratic power and discretion are inescapable facts. Bureaucracies are even more likely than elected bodies to be perceived as unaccountable and lacking in responsiveness. Representativeness is a primary means by which democratic governments link policy makers (including agency managers) with citizens/clients. There is a continuing normative debate about the need for and characteristics of representative bureaucracy. Including Krislov (1967, 1974), those advocating a representative bureaucracy in the United States have posited that inclusion of diverse publics within government agencies promotes agency responsiveness to broader public concerns. Selden, in perhaps the most comprehensive review of the literature on “representative bureaucracy,” (1997, 34) quotes Krislov and Rosenbloom (1981, 2): “[i]t is not the power of public bureaucracies per se, but their unrepresentative

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power, that constitutes the greatest threat to democratic government.” She further argues that a representative bureaucracy expands the opportunity to make a range of societal voices heard in public decisions, but she also notes that mere demographic representation (or so-called passive representation) may be insufficient to assure outcomes favorable to certain groups. How should we go about changing bureaucracies so that they are more truly representative? Historical examples such as Andrew Jackson’s efforts in the 1830s to open administrative offices to non-traditional groups of civil servants, legislation resulting from the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and more recently, affirmative action programs and the establishment of the Glass Ceiling Commission are all reminders that the reliance on purely legal or legislative means to assure greater representativeness in public sector jobs achieves only limited success. The courts have generally favored incremental adjustments in response to changing demographic or social conditions (for example, Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara County [1987]), a view that finds reflection in many concepts of representation as well (Naff 2001). However, reliance on legal/legislative criteria alone rarely deals with related vital issues: concentrations of female and male employees in certain types of departments or agencies (glass walls), and the lack of upper level managerial opportunities for employees from traditionally disadvantaged groups (glass ceilings). Just as formal, legal remedies are often insufficient for helping members of traditionally disadvantaged groups achieve parity, reliance on market forces is also insufficient. Traditional supply and demand models often do not explain the persistence of gendered or racialized opportunity structures within organizations, especially those organizations that tend to channel employees into specific market or employment segments. Even if accepted at face value, supply-and-demand arguments merely suggest a cause for limited representation. Though sometimes employed in such a manner, supply-and-demand arguments do not relieve public bureaucracies, or the government in general, of the responsibility to address shortages of supply in order to become more representative. Indeed, commitment to addressing any shortages of supply must be the cornerstone of achieving a more representative and just bureaucracy. Other critics will argue that it is not a lack of qualified women but rather organizational culture that remains the greatest barrier to representation. Kanter’s (1977) research suggests the importance of organizations’ willingness to commit formally and informally to changes in their power


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structures and internal climate in order to alter gender stereotypes that hinder women’s advancement in the organization. However, few agencies will admit to having exclusive or excluding cultures. Agency managers will more likely see their culture and practices as reasonable and an expression of the proper values for their profession or practice. Another area of the representation debate, one with both normative and empirical dimensions, focuses on the nature of the representation itself. Cook (1992, 417) argues that descriptive representation is less likely [than substantive representation] to advance the interests of underrepresented groups in administrative settings in that it “ . . . conceive[s] of representation, representative institutions, and public administration only in instrumental terms” (also see Pitkin 1967). Yet many scholars maintain that if workforce representation is to achieve the broader goal of policy representation demographic changes in an agency’s workforce should lead to changes in agency missions and policy outputs (Gallas 1985; Meier and Nigro, 1976; Meier 1975, 1993; Saltzstein 1979; Naff 1995; Selden 1997; Greene, Selden, and Brewer 2001). As we discuss in chapter 2, organizational researchers have noted that changes in power structures, organizational structural forms, and preferred decisional processes are likely to be reflected in agency missions and policies (Kelly and Duerst-Lahti 1995). Henry (1980) even suggests that members of traditionally disadvantaged groups are better qualified to make policy that addresses problems experienced by the requisite group than are members of traditionally advantaged groups. Still other scholars argue that it is not enough for underrepresented groups to be well represented in the aggregate. Rather, these scholars argue that traditionally disadvantaged groups need to be represented in each particular policy area and in high-level managerial positions. Higherlevel agency administrators make policy decisions, set standards to guide the actions of subordinates, and interact with numerous external institutions, officials, and groups (Elling 1990). Frederickson (1990) argues that block equality, which is achieved at high levels of aggregation (for example, the entire agency or the entire city government) and unrelated to the nature of the positions held by various groups of individuals in an organization, cannot meet an agency’s ultimate representational goals. Rather, it is segmented equality that renders bureaucracies representative at each and every level of the organization as well as across different types of government agencies. Segmented equality is essential for the achievement of substantive policy representation in each particular area of government. Following Frederickson’s logic we argue that representational equality at

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the highest administrative levels and across different types of agencies is essential for promoting the interests of traditionally disadvantaged groups. This is essential if women and ethnic minorities are to have policy shaping capabilities that rival those of white male bureaucrats. It is not only in the academic realm where normative issues are important to discussions of representative bureaucracy. The political cultures of many cities and states may lead public decision makers to espouse value preferences that are inimical to the achievement of substantive policy representation. Kelly and Duerst-Lahti (1995, 51) are poignantly critical of normative traditions that deny real differences in employees (and their values) by assuming a monocultural/unigender orientation. They write, “One of the major dilemmas involves the vexatious situation of having an empirical reality of diverse individuals living in varied contexts coupled with a political philosophy . . . and analytical tradition that asserts individuals are universally the same, having no context and physical bodies.” Although the life chances of members of traditionally disadvantaged groups should not be restricted because of their sex or ethnicity, neither should we assume that all perspectives and experiences are the same as the dominant one. To assume the latter is to deny the true value of representative bureaucracy. The above discussion is pertinent to chapter 6, which addresses ethnicity and representative bureaucracy, but there are some other normative questions specifically involving ethnicity that we need to address. We will not extensively explore ethnicity in public employment in this book. Although we feel that the interaction of ethnicity and sex is very important, the complexity of the analysis and description prohibit us from exploring this interaction fully. Yet, we believe that in a book on women’s employment it is important to include a preliminary discussion of the opportunities and challenges for women of color in the public bureaucracy. One indicator of the opportunities for traditionally disadvantaged groups is widespread access to attractive employment opportunities (Welch and Sigelman 2000), but of course, ethnocentrism and sexism have created a situation in which women of color tend to be disproportionately in need of public support and in low paying occupations (Thomas and Alderfer 1989; Naff 2001). Public employment is an important point of access for women attempting to achieve upward economic and social mobility. Some researchers maintain that the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of U.S. cities could increase the potential for competition among ethnic groups over economic and political resources, including municipal government jobs (Rosenbloom 1973; McClain and Karnig 1990; McClain 1993; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 2000). Although competition between


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African American women and Latinas is not the focus of this book, the empirical findings presented in chapter 6 may be of heuristic value, and better yet, may provide preliminary answers to questions about interethnic employment competition. Any examination of public employment for women and ethnic minorities will inevitably raise the controversial issues surrounding affirmative action policies. Twenty-five years ago Rosenbloom (1977) concluded that policies of nondiscrimination alone are insufficient to ensure adequate levels of representation among women and persons of color, especially in high-level bureaucratic positions. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the focus of government policies did shift, temporarily and in piecemeal fashion, from nondiscrimination to taking affirmative action to help ensure expanded opportunities for members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. Recently, however, the progress of traditionally disadvantaged groups has been placed in serious jeopardy because many units of government have repealed affirmative action programs and/or equal employment opportunity laws/ordinances, while other units have retreated from initiating public policy in these areas. Likewise, the Supreme Court has recently taken a more conservative approach to affirmative action/equal employment opportunity policies through application of a strict scrutiny standard to race-conscious policies implemented by all levels of government (Naff 2001, 21). In terms of democratic values, the primary reason that greater female and ethnic representation among managerial personnel is an important policy and political question is that greater representation is likely to result in changes in both the direction and scope of agency policies as well as management styles and leadership processes, perhaps making them more innovative and democratically responsive to constituent needs (among others see Gilligan 1982; Hale and Kelly 1989a; Beck 1991; TollesonRinehart 1991; Duerst-Lahti and Johnson 1992; Stivers 1993; Chaney and Saltzstein 1998; Naff 2001). Before turning attention to the theoretical foundations of our empirical analysis in chapter 2, we provide a brief overview of women’s employment progress in federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies. A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT PROGRESS IN FEDERAL, STATE, AND MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES In the same manner that employment researchers must be sensitive to whether they are studying the private, non-profit, or public sector,

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researchers who focus on public sector employment must be aware of differences between the various levels of government in the federal system. Each level of government has its own employment context that results in relative advantages and disadvantages for women and other minorities. The resurgent academic interest in the concepts of representativeness and representative bureaucracy over the last decade has triggered renewed research on public sector employment issues at all levels of government, federal, state, and municipal (see, for example, Selden, Brudney, Kellough 1998; Selden 1997; Naff 2001; Stivers 2001). Below we sketch, in a brief fashion, women’s employment progress at each of these governmental levels.

Federal Government Most studies have shown that while there has been some progress, “women are still substantially underrepresented as a population in the higher levels of management” (Ballard and Lawn-Day 1996, 41; Naff 2001). For instance, research on federal government employment indicates that in the late 1980s only 32 percent of all federal management positions and 10 percent of SES positions were held by women. These are marginal increases from a half decade earlier and the percentage of SES positions held by women increased to a mere 17 percent by the mid-1990s (Ballard and Lawn-Day 1996; Guyot 1998; Naff 2001). Other studies echo these findings by suggesting that women continue to face occupational segregation (that is, glass walls) and glass ceilings at the federal level (Lewis and Emmert 1986; Kellough 1989; Bayes 1991; Cornwell and Kellough 1994; Naff 1994; Naff and Thomas 1994; Carroll, Patton, and Alm 1995; Daley 1996; Crum and Naff 1997; Mani 1997). The latest study by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) finds that during the decade of the 1990s “ . . . representation of women and minorities in the career [senior executive service] SES steadily increased” (2001, 3). The proportion of women in the SES increased from 10 to 22 percent during the 1990s; the percentage of ethnic minorities, the definition of which includes African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, increased from 7 to 13 percent from 1990 through 1999 (GAO 2001, 3). Closer examination of these data indicates considerable variation in the distribution of women and members of minority ethnic groups across different types of federal government agencies.


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State Government According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1998), if education and hospital sectors are excluded, state and local governments employ about 7.2 million workers of which almost two-thirds work for local governments, such as counties, cities, special districts, and towns. Just over 40 percent of all state workers were employed in executive, managerial, and professional positions (1998). Given the large percentage of managerial positions, one might expect (1) ample opportunities for women to be represented across a wide spectrum of state agencies, and (2) to observe a sizable number of women employed in higher-level state agency positions. On the contrary, women occupied only about 20 percent of executive positions at the state level in the early 1990s (Bullard and Wright 1993). If patterns observed at the federal level also hold true in state bureaucracies, we would expect that female representational patterns assume the familiar K shape (Guyot 1998) with women in some (highly visible) top-level political positions and the majority in lower ranks of the bureaucracy. Researchers suspect that the proportion of women holding mid- and lower-level managerial and professional jobs may be associated with the proportion of women promoted into top administrative positions (Newman 1994; Reid, Kerr and Miller 2000; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 2002), but research on state-level bureaucracies is far from comprehensive. Only large states like California, which has had an aggressive affirmative action program for several decades, are well researched. Bayes’s (1989) work suggests that women and minorities in the California state bureaucracy have made progress; however, only a quarter of the highest management and supervisory positions were filled by women. If higherlevel professional positions are included, the proportion rises to about one out of three. When specific job categories are examined, progress has been mixed. The same mixture of results has been found at the various levels of government. Dometrius and Sigelman (1997) concluded that while the numbers of female officials and administrators at the state and local levels increased, the overall number of women at all levels of government declined during the 1980s.

Municipal Governments Over the last five decades municipal bureaucracies have grown in significance as municipal service delivery needs have increased. Municipali-

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ties, however, relative to state governments have a small number of positions available in executive and high-level administrative positions (Bureau of Labor Statistics 1998). The proximity of local governments to their constituencies would suggest a particular sensitivity of those governments to employing a cadre of employees that reflects the demographic composition of the population. At the local level positive representational effects can be eroded by pressures that negatively impact better representation. For instance, it might be assumed that greater numbers of females in elective offices in municipal governments might produce greater female representation in the bureaucracy (Dye and Renick 1981; Eisinger 1982; Saltzstein 1986; Welch, Karnig, and Eribes 1983; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 1998). Female representation could be further eroded by other institutional forces such as the presence of unions (Riccucci 1986; Walker 1985) or the lack of normative commitments by agency heads to hiring and promoting non-traditional workforces (Saltzstein 1986; Slack 1987). Nevertheless, we know relatively little about gender-based employment distributions or the advancement of women into high-level administrative posts in municipal government bureaucracies. Rubin reports that in 1997, the proportion of women employed in state/local government stood at 44 percent. However, like much previous research, Rubin’s research combines state and local governmental units. Another research limitation is that available studies tend to focus more typically on specific departments, especially police and fire. A sizable number of studies is available on local police departments (for example Lewis 1989; Warner, Steel, and Lovrich 1989; Chaney and Saltzstein 1998; Gaston and Alexander 1997). For the most part these studies find that women are very poorly represented in police workforces especially in the higher management positions, but little is known about workforces in other types of municipal departments. CONCLUSION Controversy abounds over definitions, causes, effects and the importance of the representation of traditionally disadvantaged groups in public bureaucracies. The consensus is that women have remained underrepresented in most managerial/professional and high-skill job categories (Reskin and Roos 1992; Guy 1993; Jacobs 1992; Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000). Gender segregation in such positions also continues at fairly high levels, contributing in many occupations to women’s lower earnings (Pfeffer and Davis-Blake 1987; Lewis 1996; Newman 1996; Miller, Kerr, and


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Reid 1999; Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000). This brief overview of general employment conditions indicates some positive trends for women overall (block equality), but has little to say about specific types of public sector agencies (an important aspect of segmented equality) or women’s access to administrative and professional jobs (another important aspect of segmented equality). Research on state and municipal governments’ bureaucratic representation suffers from severe data constraints. Because employment data reported to the EEOC by cities and states are not in the public domain, typically these data must be obtained directly from each city (or state), a timeconsuming and expensive undertaking. Furthermore, research based on data obtained directly from states and cities (or from professional associations) tends to be based on small samples and is likely to suffer from reporting/sample bias (Dye and Renick 1981; Bullard and Wright 1993; Newman 1994; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 1998). The availability of an extensive data set (EEO-4) obtained from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission allows us to explore in greater detail female employment patterns and women’s progress in state and municipal bureaucracies as well as the progress of women of minority ethnic background. The next chapter will address barriers to women’s employment and advancement that are associated with the policy missions of the agencies or departments that employ them—and presents the theoretical foundation upon which our empirical analysis of glass walls and glass ceilings is based.

Chapter 2

BARRIERS TO THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN STATE AND MUNICIPAL PUBLIC BUREAUCRACIES: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND PREVIOUS EMPIRICAL WORK

In this chapter we present a theoretical discussion that serves as the basis for our empirical analysis of glass walls and glass ceilings in state and municipal bureaucracies. First, we provide a more thorough discussion of the concepts of passive, active, and symbolic representation—and we review some of the seminal studies on these topics. Second, we discuss barriers to women’s representation using the metaphors of glass walls and glass ceilings. Third, we discuss the expected relationships between agency missions on the one hand and the existence of glass walls and glass ceilings on the other. Fourth, we present our theoretical expectations for the employment progress of Latinas, African American women, and white (non-Hispanic) women. Based on our reading of the literature and theoretical expectations, the final part of this chapter states the hypotheses that we will test in chapters 4, 5, and 6. PASSIVE, ACTIVE, AND SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION IN PUBLIC SECTOR BUREAUCRACIES As we noted in chapter 1, there has been extensive debate regarding the use of the terms passive and active representation. “Passive representation denotes the degree of congruence between the composition of a public bureaucracy and the society in which it exists (Mosher 1968). Active representation [on the other hand] denotes groups of civil servants making

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policy implementation decisions that systematically benefit one group or another among the agency’s clientele (Mosher 1968; Thompson 1976)” (Hindera and Young 1998, 655). Those who advocate the use of the active/passive distinction argue that the presence of a significant number of traditionally disadvantaged group members in an agency may not necessarily influence policy in the agency (Blum, Fields, and Goodman 1994). These scholars focus on measuring the presence or absence of policy outputs and do not focus primarily on the processes that might lead to diversity, such as the interplay of personal preferences, organizational conditions, or policy missions of the agency (Selden 1997, 84) or on the economic, social or status benefits to the individual members of these groups as a result of their members’ employment in the agency. The passive/active distinction has strong intuitive appeal and political implications. Policy makers might focus on one side or the other (passive or active). If, for instance, “representative bureaucracy” means “passive representation,” which is a roughly numerical representation of a population’s composition inside bureaucratic agencies, then the task would appear to be straightforward. We might rely on widely practiced measures and familiar remedies such as the following: programs like Affirmative Action/EEO legislation to assure access of underrepresented groups to educational and employment opportunities, changes in professional standards and codes, or sanctions enforced by the court system that are designed to curtail the most visible discriminatory practices in job settings. Historically, however, even such straightforward legal/legislative remedies have been insufficient to achieve the goal of passive representation (King 1993; Myers and Sprigs 1997). Even assuming that passive representation could be achieved, other scholars might argue that representative bureaucracy must be active to be truly representative. If not active, this perspective argues, then the number of minorities in an agency has little policy meaning for the minority group as a whole. For our part, we will use the term “bureaucratic representation” to denote representation of a group in an agency in proportion to their makeup in the community. Then, to avoid the negative connotation of “passive,” we will use the term “descriptive” in our discussion. “Descriptive” means representation of a group in proportion to its numbers in the population but does not imply active or passive characteristics. Despite the widely accepted claim that descriptive representation is not sufficient to insure active representation (Meier 1975; Meier and Nigro 1976; Selden 1997), the literature based on measures of descriptive representation con-

BARRIERS TO THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN

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stitutes a strong, continuing research tradition (Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999; Reid, Miller, and Kerr 2000; Greene, Selden, and Brewer 2001; Dometrius and Sigelman 1997). We feel that a complete analysis of the patterns of descriptive representation is essential in order to address any of the larger issues of policy representation. Beyond the benefit of active representation of their interests in constituency-oriented policy making, there is another way in which descriptive representation benefits traditionally disadvantaged groups. Scholars continue to examine questions of descriptive representation because the allocation of public sector management positions frequently represents an important set of (active) public policy outputs. The importance of these policy outputs cannot be ignored and should not be referred to as passive. If we define with Selden “active” as the process of bureaucrats advancing the interests of groups with whom they share demographic origin (Selden 1997, 43) then the mere act of hiring a member of an underrepresented group into a managerial position advances the interests of this group. In other words, the dichotomy between passive and active representation is extremely misleading in the context of employment policy because there is nothing passive about changes in the distribution of highlevel public sector positions among women and men or among different ethnic/racial groups. Employment policy designed to secure agency jobs for members of traditionally disadvantaged groups frequently requires a conscious attempt on the part of agencies and their managerial personnel to change one or more of the following types of factors, factors that are not necessarily distinct: recruitment/screening/hiring/retention practices, job descriptions and responsibilities, organizational culture, relationships with clientele/ other actors external to the bureaucracy, and the like. One cannot simply assume that such decisions evolve routinely in an organization. Rather, they require both symbolic and economic reallocation of human capital resources in agencies, especially in those agencies that have compiled poor records of attracting and retaining members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. In sum, the authoritative allocation of managerial jobs represents an important set of public policy outputs, and change in the distribution of jobs among ethnic and gender groups may itself require a measure of active policy representation. Many recent studies have questioned the explanatory efficacy of the traditional passive/active dichotomy. In fact, Hindera and Young (1998), Meier (1993), and Selden (1997) among others have undertaken efforts to meld active and passive/symbolic/descriptive representational approaches,

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arguing that both individual bureaucrats entering organizations and the organizations themselves must accommodate differential value systems in order to be effective agents for the populations they represent. Likewise, Meier and Bohte (2001, 456) contend that focusing on either the active or the passive component of representation limits the usefulness of the concepts for analytical purposes—and certainly we agree that when data are available that it is desirable to examine both aspects of representation. They argue that “research on the topic has shifted its focus to specifying the precise ways that representative bureaucracies perform their functions and to assessing relevant policy impacts” (457). Though we do not directly measure the policy impacts of women in public agencies, we have included the active representation or policy output side of this discussion in our analysis through the classification of the agencies in our analysis by policy area. We will contend that there is a connection between the policy output of an agency and the level of women’s employment in these agencies. In fact, the policy mission of the agency goes a long way in explaining the level of the representation of women in those agencies. Whatever the causes, women are allowed to have a voice in some policy areas and are more restricted in their voice in other policy areas. As we shall argue, descriptive and active representation are both crucial components of women’s public sector employment. “Symbolic representation” is a third way to conceptualize representation in a bureaucracy. Symbolic representation relies heavily on emotive appeal (Pitkin 1967). With symbolic representation, neither agency mission, nor commitment, nor the employment composition of a public entity is the key issue. The key feature is one’s emotive response rather than cognitive realization that one is represented throughout the body politic or that groups perceive themselves as adequately represented. Accordingly, symbolic representation operates through powerful metaphors and symbolism. For example, some advocates of public choice approaches suggest that the market will take care of inequities because agencies or businesses would want to hire underrepresented groups to gain the appearance of legitimacy (or customer focus) in the eyes of their respective constituencies (Blais and Dion 1991; Niskanen 1971). Efforts that signal goodwill to the underrepresented groups, if sufficiently well-designed, can (1) forestall any real change in power relationships and (2) quiet those forces seeking to redress imbalances through concrete change in policies or organizational behaviors. Symbolic representation can thus be accomplished either with or without achieving true descriptive representation (or parity). “Symbolic representation is based on a system of [supposedly] shared values, func-


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tioning as a two-way correspondence, agreement between the ruler and the ruled” (Duerst-Lahti and Verstegen 1995, 215, 217, citing Pitkin 1967). The intent of those signaling change is not necessarily to effect change, but to preserve and protect a status quo that works to their advantage. In the modern era, with its emphasis on visual media, the power of this representational tool must not be underestimated. A highly visible example of symbolic representation from the electoral arena is selection of members for the president’s cabinet in order to signal commitment to representation of a diversity of constituents. In the administrative realm, the hiring of a woman or an ethnic minority to a prominent position in an otherwise largely male and/or white agency such as a police or fire department is assumed to have a similar signaling effect; however, such signaling may actually decrease the likelihood of a significant change in the direction of policy. BARRIERS TO WOMEN’S REPRESENTATION: CULTURAL AND SYSTEMIC IMPEDIMENTS, GLASS WALLS AND GLASS CEILINGS Women continue to be underrepresented in powerful, top management positions (Powell, 1993), filling less than 5 percent of the most coveted top management positions in the largest publicly traded corporations in the United States (U.S. Department of Labor 1991). Traditional economic theories have argued that the supply side is the critical factor in the distribution of jobs and employment opportunities (that is, differences in attainment at work are attributable to human capital differences between women and men or blacks and whites (Reskin and Cassirer 1996; Reskin and Roos 1992; Acker 1990). Others, however, have argued that supply side approaches fail to examine the demand side, or segmented labor market approaches (Greenhaus, Parasuraman, and Wormley 1990; Edwards 1979; Kaufman 1986)—meaning that employers have developed segmented job markets to which they attract certain types of employees. They further argue that, for example, black workers tend to be concentrated in a peripheral labor market comprised of jobs that offer few of the advantages associated with bureaucratization in which procedures tend to protect workers against abuses. Reskin and Roos (1990) discuss several ways in which men maintain their privileged position in the labor queue (see also Acker 1990; Baron and Newman 1990; Reskin 1988). Male supervisors may use social closure processes to resist attempts at job integration. They may call on administrative rules and requirements for very particular skills and experi-

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ence, to effectively limit the pool of women competing for what may be considered the better jobs. By segregating women into feminized jobs, men are free to compete among themselves for higher paying jobs that offer better career opportunities (Cockburn 1991; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). Even though the most visible and obvious types of barriers are slowly disappearing, culturally-based impediments continue to make access and promotion of women a challenge in many public and private organizations. Maume (1999) describes a “status composition perspective” through which occupations with large numbers of female members are devalued in the eyes of the organization. These female jobs are viewed as less mission-critical to the organization, less likely to contribute to the bottom line, or are viewed to require less sophisticated skills. Steinberg (1990) and Steinberg, Haignere, and Chertos (1990) in their analysis of comparable worth job evaluation schemes found that women received fewer points for the skills used in their jobs compared with the skills in men’s jobs, resulting in lower pay for women. Moreover, employers tended to provide fewer training opportunities to women in feminized occupations (Acker 1990; Baron and Newman 1990; Bielby and Baron 1986; Cockburn 1991; Reskin 1988; Tomaskovic-Devey 1993). The likely result of such workplace policies/decisions is that low pay is coupled with the denial of opportunity to grow professionally, which, in turn, may result in fewer women advancing to the organization’s most prized positions. Those women who do enter male-dominated occupations are often harassed or isolated, which limits their effectiveness (Kanter 1977) and drives some out of their positions (Jacobs 1989). The social closure argument further contends that women are confined to short promotion ladders in which the few available supervisory opportunities are confined to supervising other women who perform routine, non-discretionary duties (Kanter 1977). Social closure processes are likely to result in glass walls and glass ceilings—and, conversely, walls and ceilings will serve to maintain social closure processes. Kanter’s (1977) analysis is important for understanding another social or culturally based impediment that confines women to specific employment areas. She argues that sponsorship is a crucial mechanism in an organization’s opportunity structure and maintains that sponsorship tends to be homosocial; that is, people tend to establish sponsorship ties with people like themselves in terms of social background. Thus, because managers were overwhelmingly men, they tended to sponsor other men, leaving little opportunity for women to advance. Her theory of homosocial reproduction suggests that men get ahead through a sponsorship model, whereas


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women can get ahead only through a contest model (Turner 1960). A sponsorship model implies an informal system of promotion through homosocial mentoring, whereas a contest model implies a system in which one advances only through formal qualifications and formalized bureaucratic procedures. This is an ironic twist on the notion of merit. Women must advance based on their merits whereas the promotion chances for men tend to be helped by factors other than their merits such as the efforts of their personal sponsors. These models are useful in helping to explain the existence (as well as the absence) of what are metaphorically referred to as glass walls and glass ceilings. DEFINING GLASS WALLS The glass wall metaphor describes occupational segregation attributed to employment barriers that concentrate women within certain types of jobs (or agencies) or that restrict women from certain types of jobs (or agencies). The literature on the distribution of women and men in public sector jobs is replete with evidence that women often face glass walls, especially in certain types of agencies (Lewis and Emmert 1986; Pfeffer and Davis-Blake 1987; Kellough 1989, 1990; Guy and Duerst-Lahti 1992; Bullard and Wright 1993; Cornwell and Kellough 1994; Lewis and Nice 1994; Naff 1994; Newman 1994; Riccucci and Saidel 1997; Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999; Kerr, Miller and Reid 2002). Glass walls are likely to persist when: (1) women are walled out of agencies because the agency clientele and a prevailing organizational culture interact to maintain impediments to change; and/or (2) women are walled in when the skills necessary to perform jobs in the agency in which women tend to work are not highly valued outside of the agency. As a result of these practices, employees are segregated into particular occupational fields and into certain types of agencies. Structural and cultural impediments such as these can be changed, but where women are walled out change is likely to be very slow and to require large and/or growing percentages of underrepresented groups (for example, descriptive representation). Moreover, agencies maintain their cultures by hiring professionals that share the same professional socialization and training of their existing workforce. DEFINING GLASS CEILINGS The term “glass ceiling” is a metaphor for barriers that restrict or block the access of women to high-level administrative positions within their

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agencies. Despite the fact that women have been able to lay claim to an increasing share of positions in the workforces of many agencies, many female professionals and administrators do not advance into high-level policy-making positions in public sector organizations (Leonard 1989; Newman 1994; Lewis and Nice 1994; Tomaskovic-Devey, Kalleberg, and Cook 1996; Korac-Kakabadse and Kouzmin 1997a; Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000). The lack of adequate representation for women in high-ranking policy positions is further exacerbated by salary disparities created by this lack of advancement, which, in turn, could compound positional disadvantages with economic ones (Baron and Newman 1989). To what extent are women represented in the top-level administrative positions in state and municipal governments? Are the impediments to female representation in the highest level administrative posts related to the policy outputs and/or organizational cultures of agencies? Studies on the integration of women into the highest administrative ranks, provide evidence that women encounter glass ceilings at all levels of government (Lewis and Emmert 1986; Pfeffer and Davis-Blake 1987; Kellough 1989; Bullard and Wright 1993; Cornwell and Kellough 1994; Lewis and Nice 1994; Naff 1994; Newman 1994; Crum and Naff 1997; Mani 1997), but the relative ease with which ceilings can be penetrated varies from agency to agency (Newman 1993; Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000; Reid and Miller 2000). We argue that an examination of glass ceilings must capture the interaction between external agency mandates, policy outputs, and the organizational cultures of various government agencies. As we argue in the next section, the reasons for the glass ceiling effect are likely to vary by policy or agency type. POLICY EXPLANATIONS FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF WOMEN AND MEN IN STATE AND MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES: LOWI REDISCOVERED We have already stated that the barriers or impediments women continue to encounter in public bureaucracies are likely to be related to policy types or agency missions. In order for representation across policy areas to be achieved (that is, segmented equality), women must be employed in the highest-level administrative positions in all types of agencies. As we noted, several factors can impede the advancement of women in the workplace. A lack of commitment to affirmative action, a lack of developmental assignments that would enhance qualifications and possibilities for


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lateral advancement, gender-biased cultures and stereotypes, outright discrimination, and the unequal distribution of opportunities and power all might contribute. We adopt the assumption that many of these impediments are institutionalized, that they constitute patterns of regularized behavior in many types of agencies. In other words, individual decisions by single managers or organizations become shaped and magnified when reinforced by generally accepted practices. Missions of many organizations or agencies are sufficiently broad to allow a wide range of hiring or promotional practices that can enhance or restrict the opportunities for women. Gender segregation or other policies negatively affecting women’s advancement in an organization are “the cumulative result of many individual selection decisions” (Perry, Davis-Blake, and Kulik 1994, 791). The assumption that these impediments are institutionalized is supported by two complementary models of employment patterns, the sociopsychological and the systemic models. These together present the contours of a theoretical framework with which to examine gender distributions in governmental administrative ranks (see, for example, Aguinis and Adams 1998). The socio-psychological model emphasizes the importance of organizational culture as a determinant of management styles that exclude women, while the systemic model focuses on the distribution of power and opportunities available to women (Lowi 1985; Guy 1990; Bayes 1991; Kelly et al. 1991; Schott 1991; Newman 1993, 1994; Mani 1997). Organizational policy missions, which strongly shape organizational culture and the influence of power (conceptualized as political power, which may vary by type of policy output), exist in a symbiotic relationship that has the potential to systematically exclude women from (1) securing positions in some types of agencies (glass walls); and (2) the highest-level and most influential administrative policy-making positions within agencies (glass ceilings) (for example, Brass and Burkhardt 1993). Supporting this, Bullard and Wright (1993) find that women have made considerable progress in securing top administrative posts in many state agencies; however, as late as 1988, women were not represented at all, or were extremely underrepresented, at the highest administrative levels in the following types of public sector agencies: agriculture, law enforcement/corrections, natural resources, commerce, attorneys general, economic development, labor, oil and gas, water pollution, and water resources. Some of the most interesting theoretical work on the relationship between agency missions and female employment patterns has been done by Lowi (1985) and Newman (1994). Lowi argues that: (1) different pol-

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icy types are associated with fairly distinct sets of structures, processes, and relationships; and (2) these structures, processes, and relationships may affect personnel patterns in government bureaucracies. Employing state-level data, Newman tests Lowi’s arguments about the relationship between policy types and employment patterns. Newman’s analysis of the distribution of personnel in Florida state bureaucracies indicates that most women work in redistributive and regulatory agencies. She argues that discrimination in the hiring and promotion of women is most severe in distributive agencies. We build on the contributions of Lowi (1985) and Newman (1994) in order to test our theoretical arguments about sex-based occupational segregation (glass walls) and impediments to the highest-level administrative positions (glass ceilings) in state and municipal public bureaucracies for the period from 1987 through 1997. The general argument is that such segregation and impediments among managerial personnel will vary depending on whether agency policy missions are on balance, distributive, regulatory, or redistributive (see Lowi 1985; Newman 1994; Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999). Below, for each type of policy, we provide a definition of the policy type, discuss the state and municipal government functions (as well as the EEOC functions) that correspond with each policy type, and state our theoretical expectations for the relationship between policy type and sex-based glass walls and glass ceilings. Distributive Policy Distributive policy benefits can be disaggregated by unit and passed out to different places (Lowi 1964). Typical distributive functions performed by state governments include: (1) construction, repair, and administration of highways and bridges; (2) administration and management of forest and other state lands as well as water resources; (3) provision and operation of parks/recreational facilities; (4) historic preservation/beautification; and (5) community development. Distributive policy functions at the municipal level include: (1) maintenance and construction of streets, highways, and bridges; (2) provision, operation, and maintenance of parks, pools, museums, and zoos; (3) planning, zoning, land development, and preservation; (4) provision and maintenance of water, electric power, transit, and airports. The corresponding state-level functions on the EEO-4 form are highways and streets, natural resources/parks and recreation, and community development (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1987–97). In municipal governments distributive responsibilities are rep-


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resented by highways and streets, sanitation and sewage, and utilities and transportation departments, and community development. Newman (1994) and Lowi (1985) argue that mutually reinforcing relationships between agency and clientele make distributive processes resistant to change, thereby making it more difficult to bring women into the fold. Distributive agencies typically employ large numbers of subject specialists from fields dominated by men (Lowi 1985; Newman 1994; Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999). Furthermore, distributive agencies are characterized by a reliance on professional/occupational norms, promotion of specialists (for example, engineers, biologists, physical and social scientists, and the like) rather than generalists, limited due process requirements, relatively wide fields of discretion, and limited sensitivity to discriminatory practices (Corson and Paul 1966; Lowi 1985; Lewis and Emmert 1986; Newman 1994; Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999). Accordingly, we expect to observe glass walls and glass ceilings among administrative and professional ranks in distributive agencies. Regulatory Policy Regulatory rules impose obligations and sanctions that seek to control individual and collective behavior (Lowi 1964). Regulatory functions performed by state governments include: (1) police protection; (2) operation of prisons, reformatories, and detention homes, including activities related to parole and probation; (3) fire protection; and (4) regulation of numerous business practices such as labor relations, securities, environmental conditions, banking, insurance, utilities, energy/oil and gas, occupational health and safety, and occupational licensing. For state governments the corresponding job categories on the EEOC’s EEO-4 form are police, fire, corrections, and utilities and transportation (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1997, form 164). For municipal government the corresponding job categories are police, fire, and corrections. Regulatory agencies such as police and fire are characterized in the literature as bastions of male dominance and many studies suggest that these agencies have developed a host of ways to keep women (and racial/ethnic minorities) out of their ranks (Cayer and Sigelman 1980; Walker 1985; Riccucci 1986; Warner, Steel, and Lovrich 1989; Rizzo and Mendez 1990; Mladenka 1991). Unlike distributive agencies, police are likely to hire personnel at the street level and promote from within their agencies to highlevel administrative positions. Especially relevant for organizations with a paramilitary work culture, such as police and fire, is the generalization that

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such organizations tend to reflect the values of their most dominant profession. For instance, a “bureaucratic ethos” (Mills 1959) and its culture (Kaufman 1960) may prevent some employees from achieving positions of prestige and influence by reinforcing sex- and ethnic-based biases through organizational practices or scripts (see also Mills and Tancred 1992). The organizational culture inside the agency thus tends to reinforce (or perhaps supplant) any professional socialization that agency members may bring with them upon entry into the agency (for example, Guy and Duerst-Lahti 1992). Because of these factors we do not think that state or municipal regulatory agencies will hire large numbers of women into professional or administrative positions; nor do we think that women will be able to penetrate the glass ceiling in these types of agencies. Redistributive Policy Redistributive policies shift wealth and/or rights between groups or classes (Lowi 1964). Redistributive functions performed by state governments include: (1) management of public welfare programs; (2) management of employment security; (3) mental health and retardation programs; (4) programs related to aging; (5) vocational rehabilitation; (6) maintenance and operation of homes and other institutions for the disabled/ needy; and (7) provision of public health services. The corresponding functions on the EEOC’s EEO-4 form are public welfare, hospitals and sanatoriums, health, and employment security (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1997). At the municipal level these functions are represented by health departments, hospitals and sanatoriums, and various public welfare programs. Redistributive agencies are likely to be supportive of affirmative action goals, and they are likely to hire those they are designed to serve (Wildavsky 1979). These agencies place heavy emphasis on recruitment at the bottom, low lateral entry, and internal promotion to top management (Lowi 1985; Newman 1994). Given the large number of female professionals in these agencies we expect to find no evidence of glass walls at either the professional or administrative level. In redistributive agencies, professional employees are likely to be recruited into administrative posts—and welfare reform policy changes as well as trends in the health care field, tend to blur the boundaries between administrative and professional positions among the middle management ranks. Even though redistributive agencies are likely to employ many individuals with progressive attitudes toward gender and ethnic equality, another


29

important feature of redistributive policy making is the high levels of interest and activism by elites (Lowi 1964). Ripley and Franklin (1990) argue that elites have an interest in having persons of high social status in the top administrative positions in redistributive agencies. We expect to find glass ceilings to be most penetrable in agencies with social equity missions (relative to other types of agencies); however, given the interest of elites in redistributive policy making, we will not be completely surprised to find evidence of glass ceilings in some state and municipal governments. BARRIERS TO REPRESENTATION OF LATINAS, BLACK WOMEN AND WHITE (NON-HISPANIC) WOMEN Thus far, we have discussed women in the aggregate without considering their ethnic backgrounds; however, the presence of women of differing ethnic backgrounds and the related question of sex- and ethnic-based occupational segregation are important for providing a more complete picture of representation in public sector agencies. In this section we discuss the extant literature and our theoretical expectations about levels of representation for Latinas, African American women, and white (non-Hispanic) women in different types of municipal level public sector agencies. “A central assumption of much of the [previous] research is that a single system of workplace attainment operates for both Blacks and Whites so that if Blacks and Whites had the same amount of education and job experience and were located across the same bureaucratized structures, the gap in Black-White attainment in the workplace would disappear. These approaches suggest that the process by which Blacks and Whites advance in the workplace is race blind” (Baldi and McBrier 1997, 479). As we have noted previously, the phenomenon of homosocial reproduction suggests that many extant theories overlook crucial organizational features that generate or support workplace inequalities (480). Research that leads to our understanding of which factors inside agencies contribute to the advancement of women by ethnic group is quite limited. Greenhaus, Parasuraman, and Wormley (1990) in their study of the legal employment field, have identified two types of occupational discrimination that influence the career development of ethnic minorities: (a) access and (b) treatment. Access discrimination, a practice consistent with the observation of glass walls, limits a person’s ability to enter specific job fields and careers. Individuals affected by treatment discrimination, a fac-

30


tor that would support the presence of glass ceilings, receive “fewer rewards, resources or opportunities on the job than they legitimately deserve on the basis of job-related criteria” (Greenhaus, Parasuraman, and Wormley 1990, 64–65). Despite the fact that many affirmative action programs were implemented over thirty years ago, minorities’ access to high status positions and practice specialties is still blocked. Discussing the lack of representation for ethnic minorities at the highest levels in public sector bureaucracies is important because different groups have different political and policy perspectives. To be sure, ethnic groups differ, on average, in their patterns of political participation. Some authors maintain that Latino incorporation into local government structures lags behind African American incorporation (Henry 1980; Karnig and McClain 1988; Hero 1992). Latino political leaders also typically must respond to a more diverse set of interests than do black leaders (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1990), presumably rendering them less able to respond to the specific concerns/interests of various Latino groups. Furthermore, Latinos, especially those who are Roman Catholics, are less likely than African Americans to view political action as a preferred means of economic resource acquisition (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1990). Females and males within a group may also differ in their participation patterns. There is new evidence to suggest that young Latinas show little interest in getting involved in formal politics (Bedolla 2000). Another important difference is that Latinas are significantly more likely than Latino males to describe the importance of formal politics from a community (rather than an individual) perspective (Hardy-Fanta 1993; Bedolla 2000). It is unclear what effect this might have on the distribution of Latinas and their coethnics (that is, male members of a particular ethnic or racial group), but to the extent Latinas seek government employment at the managerial level, one pattern consistent with these attitudinal differences is that Latinas will be more likely to seek positions located in agencies with social equity missions than in other types of agencies. Because we do not examine units of government that do not have sizeable populations of both Latinos and blacks, we limit our empirical analysis of women by ethnic group to an examination of municipal bureaucracies in multiethnic cities (see chapter 3). Only a few studies address whether women of minority ethnic background experience differential impediments to (1) securing managerial positions in government agencies, and (2) advancement in their agencies. The high levels of aggre-


31

gation typically employed to examine ethnic and gender job patterns may obscure the fact that the representation of ethnic groups may vary both by ethnic group and by sex. We are particularly interested in exploring the extent and nature of employment inequalities between Latinas, African American women and white (non-Hispanic) women in public sector managerial positions in multiethnic cities, but we also examine the managerial level employment patterns of so-called coethnics (that is, comparing women to men within a particular ethnic group such as African American women to African American men). Studies that focus on the distribution of public sector jobs among racial/ethnic groups (without disaggregating by sex) provide consistent evidence that African Americans and Latinos are underrepresented in federal, state, and local bureaucracies at the highest organizational levels and in certain types of agencies, especially those with distributive and regulatory policy commitments (among others see Rosenbloom 1973; Hall and Saltzstein 1975; Cayer and Sigelman 1980; Dometrius and Sigelman 1984; Kellough 1990; Meier and Stewart 1991; Kellough and Elliot 1992; McClain 1993; Cornwell and Kellough 1994). Although ethnic minorities do not usually achieve parity at the highest organizational levels in redistributive agencies—those agencies most likely to have social equity missions and/or long-standing commitments to affirmative action—relatively speaking, representation of ethnic minorities in these types of agencies tends to be higher than in other types (Rosenbloom 1973; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 2000). Hunter (1991) argues that minority women are subjected to both gender and racial inequalities and discrimination. Hunter also argues that discriminatory burdens are heavier for minority women than for any other group, including minority men, a claim that seems to be supported by empirical findings in the literature (Welch, Karnig, and Eribes 1983; Dometrius and Sigelman 1984; Daley 1996; Moore and Mazey 1986; Greene, Selden, and Brewer 2001; Naff 2001).1 However, due to serious data limitations, even the most recent studies provide, at best, a partial picture of the public sector employment profiles of sex-ethnic groups. For example, in a recent study on federal government bureaucracy, Naff attempts to determine if all members of society achieve full representation. Although this research provides some interesting findings—for example that minority women and men face a glass ceiling that is unrelated to human capital factors—it, like most other studies in the literature, also suffers from significant data limitations. First, the survey data made

32


available by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board is not disaggregated by type of agency, and second, all persons of color are aggregated into a single group, making it impossible to differentiate between Latinos and blacks (or between other minority ethnic groups).2 Dometrius and Sigelman (1984) are primarily concerned with comparing the performance of the public and private sector in the area of affirmative action, but some of their findings on the public sector employment progress of ethnic minority women and men provide early, if only general, benchmark figures. Their analysis of 1980 EEOC and census data indicates that state and local governments do a better job than the private sector at providing employment opportunities for women and ethnic minorities (Dometrius and Sigelman 1984). Though limited by the aggregation of their data across all types of agencies, and also across state and local units of government, Dometrius and Sigelman (1984) conduct an analysis of public sector administrative employees in which they find that all categories of women are highly underrepresented at the administrative level. The administrative workforce representativeness ratios for women of minority ethnic background (Hispanic female, 0.19; African American female, 0.34) are smaller than the ratio for white women (0.47) (Dometrius and Sigelman 1984). Likewise, Welch, Karnig, and Eribes (1983) find that among southwestern U.S. cities Hispanic females have the worst levels of representation—only four-tenths of the parity rate in 1978 for the aggregate public sector workforce, which of course, includes lower level public sector positions. By contrast, among administrative workforces the representativeness ratio for Hispanic females in 1978 was a dismal 0.0003 (Welch, Karnig, and Eribes 1983, 665). Moore and Mazey (1986) find that white women and African American women approach their general numbers in the population throughout the decade of the 1970s, but that Spanish surnamed males and females are significantly underrepresented in public sector workforces. This analysis, again, does not control for job category or agency type, controls that are necessary for determining whether or not sex-ethnic groups are consistently underrepresented (or well-represented) across different types of agencies and in the better paying, more prestigious administrative/policy-making positions in state and municipal agencies. The data used in these studies is more than 20 years old and thus reflects an employment environment in which Latino populations were typically much smaller than African American populations. In the next section, based on our reading of the literature, we pose several hypotheses on glass walls, glass ceilings, and sex-ethnic groups.


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HYPOTHESES Hypotheses for Glass Walls and Glass Ceilings in State and Municipal Agencies Glass Walls The hypotheses we test for state and municipal government workforces are: (1) women will be underrepresented among administrative and professional workforces in distributive and regulatory functions (glass-wall hypothesis); (2) within regulatory functions, we expect levels of occupational segregation to be greatest in police and fire; and (3) in redistributive functions, states and cities will achieve gender balance among administrative and professional workforces (gender-balance hypothesis). We expect to observe little or no movement over time toward gender balance in police and fire, but in corrections, distributive, and non-policing regulatory functions (utilities and transportation for states), we expect to observe slight movement toward gender balance. Glass Ceilings Based on our theoretical expectations we pose the following glassceiling hypothesis for state and municipal bureaucracies: (1) female administrators will encounter fewer permeable glass ceilings and female professionals will experience smaller salary disparities in distributive and regulatory functions; (2) in redistributive functions female administrators will experience limited ceiling impediments and professionals we expect will experience limited salary disparities. Hypotheses for Representation of Latinas, African American Women, and White (Non-Hispanic) Women in Municipal Government Bureaucracies We pose the following five hypotheses for Latinas, African American women, and white (Non-Hispanic) women and their coethnics: (1) all groups of women will be underrepresented among administrative and professional workforces in regulatory and distributive agencies, but white women will experience the highest levels and Latinas the lowest levels of representation; (2) in redistributive agencies among administrative and professional workforces white women will be the most likely women’s group to reach/approach parity; African American women may approach parity in some cities and Latinas will be consistently underrepresented in

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redistributive agencies; (3) in distributive and regulatory agencies we expect that females from all three groups will indicate lower levels of representation than their male coethnics; (4) in redistributive agencies white females will be as well represented as white males, African American females will be better represented than African American males, and Latino males will experience higher levels of representation than will Latinas; and (5) given the historically advantageous position of white males and the historically disadvantageous position of other sex-ethnic/racial groups, we generally expect increases over time in the representativeness ratios of the latter at the expense of the former. SUMMARY We believe that descriptive representation is important. Undeniably, it is valuable to traditionally disadvantaged groups in terms of opportunities for employment and status advancement. It is also a precursor to policy representation within the bureaucracy. Though some may debate the extent of active representation that results from descriptive representation, we have little doubt that a sufficient presence of previously excluded groups at the managerial level in public bureaucracies will influence organizational policy outcomes. We have also reviewed the literature describing the impediments to workforce representation (glass walls) and impediments to policy leadership positions (glass ceilings). Our understanding of the literature and Lowi’s policy categories leads to two conclusions. First, members of traditionally disadvantaged groups are likely to influence policy by their presence in the bureaucracy. Second, policy missions shape many agency practices and impediments that traditionally disadvantaged groups face in their quest for better employment and policy representation. Moreover, the effects of policy missions and agency practices are likely to vary by sex and by ethnicity. In the next chapter we discuss the data, variables, measures, and methods that we use to test our hypotheses on glass walls, glass ceilings, and sex-ethnic groups. NOTES 1. Many studies that examine both ethnic and gender employment patterns draw on sociological or economics perspectives and rely on national workforce data. These data include primarily private sector positions. Although our primary concern is public sector employment patterns, we find it useful to review briefly some of the recent findings based on national workforce data. Bound and Dresser (1999) find that between 1973 and 1989 the wage gap between black women and


35

white women increased primarily because of industrial restructuring. Similar to the findings for blacks, the economic fortunes of women of Mexican origin deteriorated between 1970 and 1990 (Corcoran, Heflin, and Reyes 1999). Other studies using national workforce data find that Latinas and African American women face dual constraints on their opportunities: they are segregated into the lowerpaying female-dominated positions, and they are further drawn into occupations that are heavily represented by coethnics (Reskin 1993; Browne, Tigges, and Press 2001). Similarly, the Department of Labor in its study of corporate glass ceilings found that women and ethnic minorities were typically tracked into positions such as human resources, corporate research, and/or administration, positions that typically did not have a direct impact on corporate earnings (U.S. Department of Labor 1991). 2. Daley (1996) also examines federal public sector ethnic-gender categories with workforce data that combine all women into two categories, minority female and white female. He finds that women and minorities are much more dependent on formal, objective factors such as education, prior experience, and performance ratings for their career success than are their white male colleagues (143). Also, jobs held by women and minorities are more likely to be in offices substantially staffed by women and minorities, thus limiting their contact with career advancement gatekeepers who are overwhelmingly white and male (159–160).

Chapter 3

DATA, VARIABLES, MEASURES, AND METHOD

This chapter addresses four objectives. First, we describe the content and format of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) EEO-4 data on states and municipalities as well as that of U.S. census data used in our analysis. Second, we describe the operational measures for glass walls, glass ceilings, and policy types—and we explain the role these variables/measures play in the evaluation of state and municipal bureaucracy employment profiles from 1987 through 1997. Third, we discuss the methods used to determine whether there is support for the research hypotheses on glass walls and glass ceilings. Fourth, we describe the methods used to assess the relative progress of Latinas, African American women, and white (non-Hispanic) women and their coethnics in securing and retaining managerial positions in municipal and state bureaucracies.1 EEOC AND U.S. CENSUS DATA Numerous studies of sex-based occupational segregation employ data from the EEOC’s Job Patterns for Minorities and Women in State and Local Government (among others see Cayer and Sigelman 1980; Moore and Mazey 1986; Sigelman and Dometrius 1986; Lewis and Nice 1994; Dometrius and Sigelman 1997; McCabe and Stream 2000). In order to guarantee the confidentiality of data reported by individual units of government, this publication combines all state and local government employ-

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ees into 49 state-level pools. The commingling of state and local data on employees makes it impossible to (1) isolate and make inferences about discrete levels of government and (2) assess differences between (and similarities in) municipal and state government employment records. Typically, empirical work on municipal- and state-level government employment by sex suffers from additional data limitations. For example, nearly all previous work is either cross-sectional or relies on a minimal number of time points, usually two (Hall and Saltzstein 1975; Cayer and Sigelman 1980; Moore and Mazey 1986; Welch, Karnig, and Eribes 1983; Dometrius 1984; Dometrius and Sigelman 1984, 1997; Saltzstein 1986; Sigelman and Dometrius 1986; Stein 1986; Kelly et al. 1991a, 1991c; Newman 1993, 1994, 1996; Lewis and Nice 1994; Riccucci and Saidel 1997; McCabe and Stream 2000). Moreover, the only time series regression analysis in the literature on women’s employment in subnational governments is based on a truncated sample of cities (Kerr, Miller, and Reid 1998).2 Some recent papers have begun to address some of the deficiencies in the literature (Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999; Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 2002); however, to date there has been no attempt to examine the sex-based composition of municipal and state government managerial workforces in a single publication or research monograph using EEOC data in a disaggregated fashion. A few studies rely on data other than those collected by the EEOC—and these studies also suffer from data limitations (Bullard and Wright 1993; Newman 1993, 1994, 1996; Riccucci and Saidel 1997). Although Newman’s (1994) work provides an excellent exposition of the theoretical bases for the relationship between occupational segregation and policy outputs, her empirical tests are based on cross-sectional data taken at one time point and on a small sample drawn from a single state. In fact, the total number of women in her sample of Florida bureaucrats is just 29—and the respondents are distributed across three policy areas. Generalizations based on such small samples should be treated as highly provisional. The data employed by Bullard and Wright (1993), American State Administration Project (ASAP) surveys over time, are limited to agency heads from across the 50 states. This sample of agency heads excludes the overwhelming majority of administrative personnel as well as all professional personnel. Similarly, Riccucci and Saidel (1997) employ individual-level data on gubernatorial appointees from nearly all 50 states, but they do not include any data on career administrative or professional personnel, the two employment groups that we argue are the most important for tracking the employment progress of


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women, and for assessing the extent and nature of glass walls and glass ceilings. In sum, most previous work does not employ time series data and is based on samples that either (1) do not discriminate sufficiently between different levels of government and different policy areas or (2) are simply too small to yield reliable results or valid generalizations about gender employment patterns among career managerial-level personnel. In this analysis we employ large time series data sets on state and municipal government employment that do not suffer from such limitations. Analysis of these data will help provide a more complete understanding of (1) the extent/structure of glass walls and ceilings in both U.S. municipal and state bureaucracies and (2) the efforts of cities and states in hiring women of minority ethnic backgrounds into public sector managerial positions. CONTENT AND FORM OF THE EEOC’S EEO-4 DATA Employment data reported to the EEOC by entities of government are not in the public domain because the data are protected by a confidentiality provision that prohibits the release of individually identifiable information.3 In most cases, these data must therefore be obtained directly from governmental units such as cities and states, a time-consuming and expensive undertaking. Alternatively, the data may be obtained through a contract with the EEOC that permits access to reports filed by individual units of government.4 The data provided from the EEOC until recently was on mainframe tapes in a format that was not readily accessible by personal computers. Converting the data to a PC readable format, and then manipulating the data so that it can be analyzed, required considerable technical support and database sophistication. The EEOC’s EEO-4 data set is the most comprehensive collection of employment and salary data on U.S. municipal and state bureaucracies. The EEO-4 data filed by cities and states are disaggregated by sex (male and female), ethnicity/race (white, black, Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, American Indian, or Alaskan Native), job category (for example, administrators, professionals, and so forth), functional policy area/department (for example, public welfare, natural resources, police, fire, corrections, streets and highways, financial administration, and so forth), and salary level.5 We obtained from the EEOC machine readable tapes for the years 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1997 that include all EEO-4 reports for cities and states that are required to file with the EEOC.

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GENERALIZABILITY AND SIZE OF THE SAMPLE Because our primary concern is about whether or not women have been able to lay claim to a larger share of the highest managerial positions in municipal and state bureaucracies, we do not attempt to generalize about employment patterns for non-managerial positions. Accordingly, the analysis is restricted to two job categories listed on the EEO-4 report, officials/ administrators and professionals. Officials/Administrators are occupations in which employees set broad policies, exercise overall responsibility for execution of these policies, or direct individual departments or special phases of the agency operations, or provide specialized consultation on a regional, district, or area basis (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1997). Administrative occupations include: department heads, bureau chiefs, division chiefs, directors, deputy directors, controllers, wardens, superintendents, sheriffs, police and fire chiefs and inspectors, examiners (bank, hearing, motor vehicle, warehouse), inspectors (construction, building, safety, rent-and-housing, fire, A.B.C. Board, license, dairy, livestock, transportation), assessors, tax appraisers and investigators, coroners, farm managers, and kindred workers (Instruction Booklet for the EEO-4 Form, various years). Professionals are occupations that require specialized and theoretical knowledge that is usually acquired through college training or through work experience and other training that provides comparable knowledge (Instruction Booklet for the EEO-4 Form, various years). Professional occupations include: personnel and labor relations workers, social workers, doctors, psychologists, registered nurses, economists, dieticians, lawyers, systems analysts, accountants, engineers, counselors, teachers, police and fire captains and lieutenants, librarians, management analysts, and kindred workers (Instruction Booklet for the EEO-4 Form, various years). Administrative and professional positions not only are the most appropriate for empirically assessing the nature of glass walls and ceilings; they also afford women the greatest opportunity for financial security/rewards and increased social status. These positions can help women achieve important personal goals such as self-determination, self-realization, and independence. As we discussed in chapter 1, laying greater claims to these positions may enable women to have a significant impact on shaping public policy at the municipal and state levels. U.S. cities and states with more than 100 employees are required to report their employment profiles on the EEO-4 form every odd-numbered year (see Appendix for the form).6 The EEO-4 data include all municipal


41

employees. The data also include all state government employees except for those who work in (1) elementary and secondary public school systems and (2) institutions of higher education.7 We conduct analysis of 49 state government bureaucracies.8 We restrict our sample of municipalities by omitting the smallest cities from the data set. From 1987 through 1995 jurisdictions with 250 or more employees were required to report employment by functional area (for example, police, welfare, streets, and so forth). Cities with 250 or fewer employees were permitted to file by functional area, but this was optional. Thus, some cities with fewer than 250 employees filed by functional area and some did not. In order to provide a better foundation from which to generalize about occupational segregation and glass ceilings across U.S. cities we omitted all cities with fewer than 250 employees from the data sets for the years 1987 through 1995. The EEOC changed its reporting guidelines again in 1996. Beginning in 1997, only cities with more than 1,000 employees were required to report by functional policy area. Initially, we were concerned that the omission of many of these medium-sized cities with employee numbers ranging from 250 to 1000 from the data set would affect our ability to generalize across time. Our summary indicators for glass walls and ceilings (reported in chapters 4 and 5), however, do not change appreciably from 1995 to 1997, leading us to believe that, in most cases, we can generalize over time with the data included in municipal and state EEO-4 reports. The only exception to this is in our wall analysis of municipal fire and police departments where we believe we see an impact when smaller all-male departments were dropped. We note and consider this in chapter 4. In departments with relatively few employees small changes in the number of women or men can result in large changes in percentages. This could produce misleading results because functions with small numbers of employees that hire one female administrator (or promote their only female administrator) will generate a much larger ceiling ratio score than will a large department that engages in the same type of hiring/promotion behavior. To help address this problem we deleted functions in a city or state if fewer than five employees were reported in a job category (administrators or professionals) within a function.9 For the glass wall analysis on municipalities this produces a sample that varies between 14 (administrators in corrections, various years) and 702 (professionals in fire in 1991) municipalities depending on the job category, functional area, and year under examination. For the municipal glass ceiling analysis our sample varies between 12 (administrators in corrections in 1985) and 284 (administrators in natural resources/parks in 1991)

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cities. The sample for the glass wall analysis on states varies between 13 (administrators in housing in 1989 and 1993) and 49 (various job categories, functions, and years) states. For the state glass ceiling analysis the sample varies between 12 (administrators in housing in 1989) and 49 (various functions and years). For our analysis of the interaction of ethnicity and sex in public employment, we needed to determine the ethnic makeup of each city’s population in order to compute a measure of representation in the bureaucracy. For this purpose we merged the closest year’s U.S. census data with the EEOC data base. To compute ethnic representation in 1987, we used the 1990 census files (State and Metropolitan Area Data Book, 1997–1998, August 1999) and the 2000 census files (Race and Hispanic or Latino Summer File, 2000; Census of Population and Housing, May 2001) were used to compute the 1997 ethnic representation measures. VARIABLES AND METHOD Our initial objective is to determine whether policy functions within cities and states indicate the presence of glass walls, or alternatively, are gender-balanced (or nearly gender-balanced)—and whether the presence of glass walls varies by policy type (see chapter 4 for analysis). Next, we attempt to determine whether functions within cities and states indicate the presence of glass ceilings and whether the permeability of ceilings varies by policy type (see chapter 5 for analysis). Then, we trace the employment progress of women in municipal bureaucracies by race/ethnicity by comparing the relative progress of the following groups of women: Hispanics, blacks, and white (non-Hispanic) (see chapter 6 for analysis). Below we discuss the methods we use to determine the presence of glass walls. TESTING FOR THE PRESENCE OF GLASS WALLS To test the glass wall and gender balance-hypotheses, we compare the distribution of female to male employees in administrative and professional positions by functional policy area. We follow previous research by employing a cutoff point of 30 percent female for gender balance (Tomaskovic-Devey 1993; Tomaskovic-Devey, Kalleberg, and Cook 1996).10 Because our goal is to identify job categories and functions in which women and men are equally or nearly equally represented (Tomaskovic-Devey 1993) the 30 percent cut point represents a reason-


43

able standard for evaluating the employment performance of municipal and state governments. Once an agency (or department) reaches or surpasses the 30 percent threshold, a critical mass of female managers is likely in place, thenceforward increasing the likelihood that female managers (1) can be retained and (2) will have opportunities for influencing policy outputs. Furthermore, departments that reach the threshold are likely to have a sufficient pool of women from which to recruit high-level administrators. Accordingly, functions within cities and states are classified as meeting the goal for gender-balance in a certain job category if their workforces are at least 30 percent female. If, on the other hand, a workforce is less than 30 percent female, we interpret this as evidence for the existence of glass walls. A conservative benchmark such as this tends to overestimate the incidence of gender balance in governmental agencies. Operational definitions of balance or parity based on a more equal share of jobs—40 or 50 percent—would produce portraits of agency gender profiles that indicate larger inequities than those documented in our empirical analysis. Classifying Agencies as Distributive, Regulatory, Redistributive, or Indeterminate We categorize agencies according to their missions, placing them within several functional policy areas. These functional policy areas then serve as an explanatory variable. The EEO-4 form includes broad descriptions of agency missions that we use in this categorization (see Appendix for descriptions). Following the suggestions of Lowi (1964, 1972, 1985) and Newman (1994), we group functions into three primary policy categories, distributive, regulatory, and redistributive.11 Grouping functions into policy types results in some inconsistencies in classification because Lowi’s policy types do not correspond precisely to the EEOC’s functional areas. The inconsistencies are due largely to the fact that Lowi’s (1964) policy categories were intended to apply to the federal government. We employ Lowi’s argument as a loose conceptual framework by which to answer the research questions. Although we recognize that Lowi’s policy categories have problems with reliability, exclusiveness of categories, and inclusiveness of policies (see especially Froman 1968), we find that the heuristic benefits and the benefits in analytic leverage associated with this framework far outweigh its shortcomings. We address these limitations by determining whether functions include policy missions that are overwhelmingly or predominantly of one policy type or another. On the other hand, if mis-

44


sions are fairly equally divided between two policy types, the function is classified as indeterminate.12 Streets and highways, sanitation and sewage,13 community development, and natural resources/parks and recreation are predominantly distributive. Police protection, fire, and corrections14 are classified as predominantly regulatory. Public welfare, health, hospitals and sanatoriums, and employment security are predominantly redistributive.15 The financial administration and general control function includes an array of missions such as tax assessment and collection, budgeting, purchasing, central accounting, personnel, human resources, civil service, planning, maintaining the treasury, and auditing as well as all judicial responsibilities. Agency missions in the housing function are fairly evenly split between redistributive and regulatory missions (see Appendix). Because neither the financial administration/general control nor housing functions fit neatly into a single policy category, we have classified them as indeterminate.16 Utilities and transportation represents a special case; we classified it as distributive for the municipal government analysis and regulatory for the state government analysis. Municipal government missions within this function focus predominantly on transit and airports, while state government missions within this function are focused predominantly on water supply, electric power, gas, and water transportation/terminals. The glass wall hypothesis will be supported if we find that females are poorly represented among administrative and professional workforces in distributive and regulatory functions. The gender balance hypothesis will be supported if we find that female administrators and professionals comprised greater than or equal to 30 percent of the workforce in redistributive functions. TESTING FOR THE PRESENCE OF GLASS CEILINGS AND SALARY DISPARITIES To assess the character of glass ceilings in municipal and state bureaucracy, we limit our analysis to the official/administrator job category (excluding professionals) because the glass ceiling metaphor as used by most practitioners and analysts refers only to the highest administrative level. It would not, in most cases, make sense to analyze employment in the professional job category in order to assess the character of glass ceilings. To determine the level or location of the potential glass ceiling within the administrative classification, we use salary as a proxy for administrative employee rank within functions. The cut point for states and cities dif-


45

fers because the percentage of state-level administrators in the top salary category listed on the EEO-4 form is usually much greater than is the percentage of municipal-level administrators in the top salary category. This is due to the fact that, on average, state employees are paid more than municipal employees. We identify the top administrative positions (below which there may be a glass ceiling) by ranking employees according to their salary level within each city or state within their functional area by year. Next, we chose the top 25 percent of the percentile rankings within each city function and the top 50 percent of the percentile rankings within each state function as the indicators of those who are in the top positions. The Ceiling Ratio Measure After ranking all employees within functions by state/city and year, we then developed a proportional measure to comparatively gauge the representation of women and men in the top administrative positions. We call this measure the “ceiling ratio.” The ceiling ratio is the percentage of all women in a particular function who are in the top percentiles of our salary rankings (50 percent and above is used as the top percentile for state administrators and 25 percent and above is used for cities) divided by the percentage of all men in the top percentile of our salary rankings in the same city or state function. The formula for the ceiling ratio for each city/state function and year equals (the number of women administrators in the top 25 or 50 percent of salary rankings/all women administrators) divided by (the number of men in the top 25 or 50 percent of salary rankings/all men administrators). A ceiling ratio value of one would mean women and men are equally represented in proportion to their total numbers in the function in the top administrative positions in that function, thereby indicating the absence of any glass ceilings. In sum, the ceiling ratio measure allows us to comparatively assess the extent of salary disparities—and, by proxy, rank in the agency—in the highest paying administrative positions while controlling for (1) the number of men and women administrators employed in a given function within each city and state, and (2) differing pay levels among cities and among states. Some would argue that women should hold roughly 50 percent of highlevel administrative positions, regardless of the number of women employed in the agency or department. It is important to note that we are not making a normative argument regarding the superiority of our proportional measure over a measure that assumes that women should hold 50

46


percent of the highest level administrative positions. Both of these approaches have validity and measure different aspects of the glass ceiling phenomena. It is our feeling that while one might argue that a 50/50 measure may be a better indication of what should be true in terms of representation, our proportional measure is a sound measure for analytical purposes since it incorporates the proportion of men and women within the agency. It can certainly be argued that there should be equal representation of men and women in the highest levels of administration in a department, but since glass ceilings imply a movement of women up into higher ranks, it is difficult to say anything analytically about glass ceilings without considering the number of potential female “movers” in an agency. To further refine our analysis we further classify glass ceilings as either absent/weak, moderate, or strong.17 A strong ceiling is said to exist if it is nearly impossible for women to make inroads into the highest paying jobs over time. If an agency is making a consistent but relatively low effort to improve, we classify the ceiling as moderate. If an agency exhibits consistently a tendency to employ roughly equal shares of women and men in the highest paying administrative positions, we classify the ceiling as weak/absent. Our operational measures of the glass ceiling classifications are as follows: ceiling ratio of 0 to 0.33 is a strong ceiling; ceiling ratio greater than 0.33 but less than 0.67 is a moderate ceiling; and ceiling ratio of 0.67 or greater is a weak/absent ceiling. Although we make no conceptual or theoretical claims that glass ceilings exist at the level of professional workforces, we do think that it is important to evaluate the extent of sex-based salary disparities among professionals in state and municipal governments. Additionally, it might be useful to know the proportion of women in the top ranks of the professional category. These top-ranked professionals may be in line for promotion to the administrative category. Accordingly, we calculate the ceiling ratio measure for professionals—not to make claims about the existence of a ceiling—but rather to evaluate the nature of salary disparities among professionals and to develop a portrait of female representation in high-level, policy-making professional positions in state and municipal agencies. Because the calculation of the ceiling ratio requires that a department have both male and female employees, we were forced to further restrict our sample to cities and states that employ women and men in their administrative and professional workforces. The exclusion of all male and all female workforces results in a truncated sample ranging between 12 and 284 cities (corrections in 1985 and recreation/parks in 1991, respectively) and between 12 (housing administrators in 1989) and 49 (various func-


47

tions and years) in states. The extent to which the sample is reduced is itself an important finding, one that is discussed fully in chapter 5. SEX AND ETHNICITY: MEASURING THE EMPLOYMENT PROGRESS/JOB SHARES OF HISPANIC, BLACK, AND WHITE (NON-HISPANIC) WOMEN In order to test our hypotheses about the representation of the intersection of sex and ethnic (sex-ethnic) groups, we measure the representational patterns of Hispanic, black, and white (Non-Hispanic) women from 1987 through 1997 in municipalities and states. The standard for representational parity when comparing women to men without controlling for ethnicity/race is straightforward because women comprise roughly 50 percent of the population. Furthermore, there is no reason to expect that this will vary greatly between geographic places. Perfect representation is thus set at 50 percent—and, as we have already discussed, the standard for gender balance is set at 30 percent or more women for the glass wall analysis presented in chapter 4. When measuring change for women by ethnic/racial group, we must control for the percentage of the requisite ethnic group in each municipality. Our measure of representation is the percentage of the sex-ethnic/racial group in the workplace divided by the percentage of the sex-ethnic/racial group in the population for the requisite city. We refer to this measure as the representativeness ratio. The formula for each year is the following: representativeness ratio (ijk) = % ethnic group by sex employed in each department (ijk) / % ethnic group by sex in the city population as reported by the Census Department, where i represents job category (that is, administrators or professionals), j represents the municipal function, and k represents ethnicity by sex as reported on the EEO-4 Form. A representativeness ratio of one should be interpreted as perfect representation; values of less than one signal underrepresentation and values of greater than one signal overrepresentation. We examine these ratios for 1987 and 1997 and their changes from 1987 through 1997 for cities by functional policy area. We limit our analysis to cities with sizeable percentages of ethnic minorities.18 Some authors have argued that urban governments tend to become more responsive to minority interests when the minority share of the population reaches 10 percent (Engstrom and McDonald 1981; Welch, Karnig, and Eribes 1983; Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984; McClain and Karnig 1990; McClain 1993). We do not dispute the findings in these

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studies, but to increase the size of the sample we adopt a cutoff of 5 percent. This allows us to increase the number of cities with sizeable Hispanic populations in 2000 that might not otherwise be included in the analysis (at the 10–10 standard) because of much smaller Hispanic population numbers based on the 1990 census. We thus restrict our analysis to cities that have populations that are at least 5 percent Latino and 5 percent African American in both 1990 and 2000. This also permits us to examine the same set of cities at both time periods, 1987 and 1997. As previously explained, a change in the sex-ethnic distribution in small departments can produce large (and misleading) percentage changes, so we delete functions in a city if there are fewer than five employees at either the administrative or professional level. Because we are interested in whether members of traditionally disadvantaged groups are able to lay claim to managerial positions we again conduct our analysis on data for administrative and professional positions only. The policy functions we examine are financial administration/general control, housing, parks and recreation, community development, sanitation and sewage, streets/highways, utilities and transportation, health, fire, and police (see Appendix).19 Depending on the job category and type of function under examination this leaves us with samples that vary between 15 cities (housing for officials/administrators) and 93 cities (police for professionals). Our initial objective is to determine by department for Latinas, African American women, and white (Non-Hispanic) women (and for their coethnics) the following: (1) the median representativeness ratios for administrative and professional workforces in each sex-ethnic group as well as the means of the representativeness ratios for both 1987 and 1997; (2) which female ethnic groups, on average, hold the largest and smallest shares of positions relative to their numbers in the city population; and (3) among coethnics which sex holds, on average, the largest and smallest shares of administrative and professional positions relative to their numbers in the city population. We calculate for each of the six sex-ethnic groups a representativeness ratio for each municipal function by dividing the percentage of administrative and professional positions held by each group by the group’s population percentage in the city. We match 1990 census data with 1987 EEOC data and 2000 census data with 1997 EEOC data. The results of this analysis are presented in chapter 6. CONCLUSION The EEOC’s data comprise the most comprehensive record of municipal and state government employees in existence. We employ these data


49

from 1987 through 1997 in order to test several glass wall, glass ceiling, and sex-ethnic hypotheses using as a conceptual framework Lowi’s (1964) policy categories. We do not need to rely on inferential statistics in order to test our glass wall, glass ceiling, or sex-ethnic hypotheses because the EEOC data sets include the entire population of municipal- and state-level administrative and professional employees by functional policy area, sex, ethnicity, and salary level (excluding Hawaii). In the following chapter we turn to the empirical tests of the glass wall and gender balance hypotheses in U.S. state and municipal governments.

NOTES 1. We prefer the labels “African American” and “Latino;” however, in order to avoid confusion we elected to use the precise labels employed on the EEO-4 form and these labels are “black,” “Hispanic,” and “white, Non-Hispanic.” However, we use “Latina” because there is no feminine form of Hispanic. 2. This study examines employment patterns in 23 U.S. cities over a nineyear period. 3. The provision that governs the release of data is Section 709 (e) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. 4. The data for our analysis are provided by the EEOC through a contract referred to as an Intergovernmental Personnel Act Agreement (IPA) authorized by the federal government. The terms of the IPA explicitly prohibit (1) sharing of data and (2) discussion or publication of empirical analysis that permits individual cities or states to be identified. Only summary statistics may be reported or discussed. 5. The EEO-4 report groups salaries into eight categories or levels. The number of salary levels has remained constant over time at eight; however, the ranges within levels have been changed periodically by the EEOC to adjust for inflation. For example, the top salary category in 1987, 1989, 1991, and 1993 was $43,000 plus and in 1995 and 1997 the top salary category was $70,000 plus. 6. The last annual report required by the EEOC was in 1991. Beginning in 1993 cities and states were required to file EEO-4 reports every odd-numbered year. 7. Elementary and secondary public school systems and districts file EEO-5 reports. Institutions of higher education (post-secondary) file EEO-6 reports. 8. The State of Hawaii was not included in the EEOC data set. 9. Functions are synonymous with the policy functions/missions as listed on the EEOC’s EEO-4 report (see Appendix for a list and description of policy functions). 10. Some researchers use a dissimilarity statistic to assess gender-based employment patterns (among others see Lewis and Nice 1994). If applied to our

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data, the statistic would measure the proportion of women and men that would have to switch departments in order to achieve an equal distribution of jobs across all departments. Assuming such a switch, the index of dissimilarity would tell us that as long as women make up, for instance, 3 percent of the total workforce, there is no dissimilarity if 3 percent of the employees in each department within the specified job category are women. As long as women are equally distributed, the index of dissimilarity finds no dissimilarity. In contrast, our questions about glass walls are: (1) how well are women represented in each department compared to their numbers in society; and (2) which departments (or functions) are doing better or worse? Assuming an even 3 percent distribution misses altogether the point of our research questions because dissimilarity indices do not provide information about representation, descriptive or otherwise. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, dissimilarity statistics are based on a questionable empirical assumption—that women and men could readily switch jobs across departments. In other words, a nurse could become a police officer and a police officer could become a nurse. This is possible but not very likely. 11. We considered employing Peterson’s (1981) three policy areas for municipal government (developmental, redistributive, and allocational) as our conceptual framework; however, the policy arenas correspond poorly to the functional areas listed on the EEO-4 report. The reporting format on the EEO-4 form aggregates employees responsible for developmental and allocational policies into single functional areas. This makes it impossible to employ the Peterson framework with EEO-4 data. 12. We do not examine the function on the EEO-4 form labeled “other” because we are unable to hypothesize about our expectations for such a diverse category. 13. The Sanitation and Sewage function is examined for municipalities, but states generally do not report employees in this function. 14. The corrections function has a distributive component. Policies in this function address issues such as where to locate prisons and detention homes. The fact that Lowi’s categories are not mutually exclusive in this regard does not affect our expectations about sex-based job segregation because we expect to find glass walls in both regulatory and distributive agencies. 15. States report employees in employment security, but cities do not. 16. The housing function is relevant for municipalities, but states rarely report any employees in this function. 17. In some of our previous work we employ 0.9 as a ceiling ratio benchmark, which we refer to as the “ceiling goal” (Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000; Reid and Miller 2000). However, upon further reflection we have revised our thinking regarding the benchmark of 0.9. The primary reason for our reconsideration is that if a unit of government generates a ceiling ratio that is short of the goal, say in the range between 0.6 and 0.9, we are not certain that glass-ceiling impediments are present. For example, suppose an agency has 20 male administrators and 20 female


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administrators, and that 11 men are in the top 50 percent of salary rankings in the agency and that 9 women are situated in the top 50 percent. Although the resultant ceiling ratio of 0.82 does not reach the 0.9 benchmark, women are nevertheless well-represented at the top administrative level. Alternatively, suppose that 12 men and 8 women are in the top 50 percent of salary rankings. Women still lay a claim to significant numbers of the higher paying administrative posts, and yet, the ceiling ratio for this latter scenario is 0.67, well under the benchmark. If substantial numbers of women are in the top-salaried administrative positions, it is not likely that glass ceilings exist. An indicator of diminishing glass ceilings is if the ratio is in this range and increasing over time. Accordingly, we elected to use a less rigid standard for detecting glass ceilings. 18. We chose not to examine states because it is more difficult to determine the community they represent. 19. Because only a few cities reported employees in hospitals, corrections, welfare, and employment security, we do not present the analyses of these functions in the tables.

Chapter 4

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF GLASS WALLS IN MUNICIPAL AND STATE BUREAUCRACIES

In order for women to have a voice in bureaucratic policy making, women must be present in the various agencies and policy areas that make such policies. What is the pattern of representation in state and municipal bureaucracies? In which policy areas are women represented and where are their voices absent? This chapter presents an empirical analysis that tests the glass wall and gender-balance hypotheses for administrative and professional positions at the municipal and state levels. The functional policy areas included on the EEO-4 form (see Appendix) are sorted into Lowi’s three policy categories (that is, distributive, regulatory, and redistributive) in order to test each hypothesis. In the final section of this chapter we (1) classify glass walls as weak, moderate, or strong, and (2) we compare the character of glass walls in municipal governments to that of glass walls in state governments. We now turn to the analysis of sex-based occupational segregation among administrators in U.S. municipal bureaucracies. SEX-BASED OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION AMONG ADMINISTRATORS IN MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES Table 4.1 reports sex-based occupational segregation patterns for administrative personnel by year and functional policy area. Our unit of analysis is the EEOC defined functional area in each city. This analysis focuses extensively on (1) the percentage of cities with administrative

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Table 4.1 Indicators of Municipal Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators

Goal for “wall” is 30% female employees. The wall goal statistic is the percentage of municipalities that reach the goal.

workforces within functional areas that reach the wall goal of at least 30 percent female as explained in chapter 3, and (2) the median percent female for city administrative cadres by functional area and year. In table 4.1 we also report the percentage of cities that employ all-male and mixedgender administrative workforces within functions by year. Distributive Functions As predicted by our glass wall hypothesis, occupational segregation among administrative cadres is pervasive in distributive functions. The results reported in table 4.1 indicate that many cities employ all-male administrative workforces and that very few cities reach the wall goal of

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF GLASS WALLS

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30 percent female in streets and highways (for example, 4 percent in 1997), utilities and transportation (for example, 9 percent in 1997), and sanitation and sewage (6 percent in 1997). In the most gender-segregated municipal function, streets and highways, approximately 96 percent of cities did not reach the wall goal in 1997. We observe substantial levels of sex-based segregation in the two remaining distributive functions, natural resources/parks and recreation and community development, but levels are not as high as those observed in streets and highways, sanitation and sewage, and utilities and transportation. Natural resources/parks and recreation and community development also show a relatively smaller percentage of all-male workforces (14 percent in parks in 1997, and 11 percent in community development in 1997). Moreover, both natural resources/parks and recreation and community development show steady movement toward gender balance between 1987 and 1997. Over this time period the number of cities reaching the wall goal increases by 23 percentage points in natural resources/parks and recreation and by 16 percentage points in community development. Even with these increases, however, the median cities in both functions weigh in with administrative cadres that are 29 percent female in 1997, just under the cutoff for gender balance. Therefore, even in the most gender-balanced distributive functions, as late as 1997, more than one-half of the cities in our sample indicate evidence of glass walls. The empirical evidence on the composition of administrative workforces in distributive agencies provides strong support for the glass-wall hypothesis. Yet, the difference between streets and highways, sanitation and sewage, and utilities and transportation, on one hand, and community development and natural resources/parks and recreation, on the other, needs to be explained. The clientele served by these two groups of agencies differs in some important respects and provides a reasonable basis for explanation of the differences in sex-based employment profiles. Businesses have a sizable stake in the allocation of benefits and privileges distributed by agencies in streets and highways, sanitation and sewage, and utilities and transportation. Because policy making and implementation by (as well as management of) these municipal-level infrastructure departments have traditionally been male-dominated, and because developers, bankers, civil engineers and the like have a large stake in the policy outcomes of these departments, maintenance of the employment status quo— patterns of all-male or nearly all-male upper management—is likely to mirror somewhat the demographic composition of primary (business) stakeholders (Baron 1991).

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These assumptions about primary stakeholders are less applicable to agencies in community development and natural resources/parks and recreation. Community development departments implement and manage open space, beautification, and preservation policy areas that sometimes draw the attention of elites, but typically do not contribute significantly to profits/losses of banking and development businesses. Furthermore, in large cities the policy missions of community development departments may include redevelopment of low income residential and commercial areas, missions that are redistributive. By the same token, the primary beneficiaries of policies administered by agencies in natural resources/parks and recreation (for example, parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, and zoos) are not businesses, but citizens, the majority of whom are lower and middle class. In sum, our empirical results suggest that the nature of agency-clientele relationships may affect sex-based employment patterns in municipal governments. The results are consistent with the proposition that the absence of a primary stake for business elites is conducive to the erosion of gender imbalance in community development and natural resources/parks and recreation. Regulatory Functions In chapter 2 we hypothesized that women would not be well-represented among administrative workforces in municipal regulatory agencies. Table 4.1 indicates that administrative cadres in police and fire are more gendersegregated than administrative workforces in corrections. Municipal administrative workforces in police departments, however, have shown more progress toward gender-desegregation than have workforces in fire departments. Fifty-nine percent of municipal administrative workforces in police were all male in 1987, but in 1997 only 22 percent of cities reported all-male administrative workforces in police. Moreover, even though only 6 percent of cities reached the wall goal in 1987, by 1997 23 percent of cities surpassed the 30 percent benchmark for gender balance. By contrast, as late as 1997, none of the 185 cities included in the sample had reached the wall goal in fire departments and 77 percent of cities employed allmale administrative workforces in fire departments. Very few cities report five or more administrators in the corrections function; however, among the handful that do, female administrative employment increased substantially between 1987 and 1997. By 1997, 29 percent of the cities in our sample (that is, 4 out of 14 cities) employed


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gender-balanced administrative workforces in corrections and the median city’s administrative workforce was 23 percent female (see table 4.1). This trend may seem encouraging, but we wish to emphasize the small number of cities reporting in corrections, and as we have noted in some of our previous work (Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999), corrections agencies, on average, have lower pay scales than do police and fire departments. Furthermore, previous research indicates that jobs within the correctional system are highly segregated by sex (Martin and Jurik 1996). Redistributive Functions We argued in chapter 2 that women are likely to be well-represented among administrative ranks in redistributive functions. As expected, the results reported in table 4.1 provide support for the gender-balance hypothesis. Not only has the percentage of women in administrative positions in redistributive agencies increased between 1987 and 1997; there is also no evidence of systematic sex-based segregation in public welfare, hospitals and sanatoriums, and health. Approximately 71 percent of cities reach the wall goal in welfare agencies in 1997 and the median city’s administrative workforce in welfare agencies was 43 percent female. Almost all cities’ administrative workforces in hospitals and sanatoriums are gender balanced (about 95 percent of cities reach the wall goal in hospitals in 1997) and the median city’s administrative workforce in hospitals was 65 percent female in 1997. Similarly, in health agencies 82 percent of cities achieved the benchmark for gender balance in 1997. Indeterminate Functions—Financial Administration and General Control and Housing U.S. cities have made significant progress toward gender balance in the diverse pool of agencies included in the financial administration and general control function. While only 46 percent of cities’ administrative workforces (290 out of 630) reached the wall goal in 1987, by 1997 about two-thirds of cities (151 out of 225) were gender balanced, and the median city’s administrative workforce was 35 percent female. One likely reason for this improvement is the dramatic rise over the last twenty years in the percentage of women enrolling and completing law school. Additionally, the number of women graduating from accounting programs has also steadily increased since 1970. Today women hold more than half of the

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jobs in accounting. Even so, some have noted difficulties in breaking through the glass ceiling and high turnover (Koretz 1997). The patterns in the data are consistent with what we would observe if these women have begun to enter administrative posts in municipal level judicial and accounting agencies. If Daley (1994) is correct, advancement in this area must be examined more closely to determine if there is evidence of sticky floors within such administrative positions. Particularly in administrative areas, women may be filling positions that may be described as “administrative assistant.” Such positions may not give women a platform from which to advance to top levels in the administrative hierarchy. We find evidence for this in our discussion of glass ceilings in the next chapter. Despite the fact that in 1997 more than one-half of cities do not reach the wall goal in housing agencies (the median city’s administrative workforce is 26 percent female) and that about one out of every five cities employed an all-male administrative workforce, the record of cities with respect to employing female housing administrators improved substantially between 1987 and 1997. Only 24 percent of cities reached the wall goal in 1987, but by 1997 44 percent of cities employed administrative workforces in housing that were at least 30 percent female. Although we cannot confirm our suspicions with the data we presently have, we suspect that women have made significant inroads into agencies that carry out redistributive missions in the housing function (for example, low rent public housing, housing for elderly, and housing rehabilitation), but that they have made relatively little progress in agencies with more regulatorybased missions such as housing code enforcement and perhaps rent control/regulation programs. SEX-BASED OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION AMONG PROFESSIONALS IN MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES Distributive Functions Patterns of sex-based occupational segregation are not as pervasive among professional workforces as they are among administrative cadres; however, the sex-based employment records of municipalities are still relatively poor in three distributive functions, streets and highways, utilities and transportation, and sanitation and sewage (see table 4.2). Large numbers of cities fail to reach the wall goal among professionals in streets and highways (80 percent in 1997), utilities (67 percent in 1997), and sanita-


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Table 4.2 Indicators of Municipal Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Professionals

Goal for “wall” is 30% female employees. The wall goal statistic is the percentage of municipalities that reach the goal.

tion and sewage (68 percent in 1997). And even though there has been some improvement over time, most cities still fall far short of the wall goal in these three functions in 1997. On the other hand, municipalities have shown significant progress in employing female professionals in natural resources/parks and recreation and community development. By 1997, 82 percent of cities employed genderbalanced professional workforces in natural resources/parks and recreation and 74 percent of cities in community development were gender balanced. The median cities in natural resources and community development in 1997 employed professional workforces that were 48 and 40 percent women, respectively.

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Regulatory Functions Comprised mostly of lieutenants and captains, professional workforces in fire and police continued to be overwhelmingly male as late as 1997 (see table 4.2). In that year, only 2 percent of cities reached the wall goal in fire and the median city’s professional fire workforce was only 1 percent female. Although there has been a reduction in the percentage of all-male professional cadres in fire—from 84 percent in 1987 to 49 percent in 1997—most of the decrease occurs between 1995 and 1997. This reduction corresponds to the change in the EEOC’s municipal government reporting requirements discussed in chapter 3. We think that most of the reduction is probably due to the fact that a large proportion of cities included in the sample in 1995, but not in the next reporting period (because cities under 1,000 were no longer required to report by functional area), were smaller cities with all-male professional workforces in fire. Furthermore, all else being equal, larger cities are much more likely to have one or more women employed as fire captains and lieutenants. Even though women are still subject to glass walls in most municipal police departments (Martin and Jurik 1996), women fare better among professional cadres in police than they do in fire departments. As was the case in fire, the percentage of all-male professional workforces in police has decreased over time—from 60 percent in 1987 to 26 percent in 1997. Once again, however, the largest decrease occurs between 1995 and 1997, the period that coincides with the changes in EEOC reporting requirements. By 1997, 14 percent of cities in our sample (58 out of 414) employed professional workforces (captains and lieutenants) that were comprised of at least 30 percent women and the median city’s professional police workforce was 11 percent female. These summary statistics provide strong support for the glass-wall hypothesis in municipal level fire and police departments. Women fare much better in corrections. However, once again we emphasize that the pay scales in corrections departments tend to be much lower than those in police and fire (Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999). Once again we note that there are jail and prison housing situations as well as processes and procedures in corrections work that might legitimately require corrections officers to be the same sex as the inmates. This dictates an increasing number of women corrections officers especially as woman are incarcerated in greater numbers. Also, the number of cities reporting professional employees in the corrections function is relatively small. Nonetheless, by 1997, 91 percent of cities (21 out of 23) employed professional workforces in corrections that were at least 30 percent women, and the median city in our sample employed a professional corrections


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workforce that was 48 percent female. Thus, we find strong support for the glass-wall hypothesis among professional police and fire workforces in U.S. cities, but not among municipal corrections workforces, which are, as a general rule, paid much less than those in police and fire. Redistributive Functions We predict that the employment patterns among municipal professional workforces in redistributive agencies should provide support for the genderbalance hypothesis. The summary statistics reported in table 4.2 indicate that nearly all cities’ professional workforces were characterized by gender balance throughout the ten-year time period in public welfare, hospitals, and health. Well over 90 percent of cities reach the wall goal irrespective of functional area or year—and median city workforces are typically comprised of over 70 percent women in these three functional areas. In sum, the results provide strong support for the gender-balance hypothesis. Indeterminate Functions—Financial Administration and General Control and Housing We chose not to posit hypotheses for Financial Administration and for Housing because these functions at the municipal level do not fit into a single policy category. Among professional workforces, women tend to be well-represented in financial administration and general control. In most years the median city’s professional workforce in this functional area was approximately 50 percent women, and by 1997, 95 percent of the cities included in our sample reached the goal for gender balance. Women are relatively less well represented in housing agencies, but agencies in the housing function have shown substantial progress toward gender balance—only 46 percent of cities reached the wall goal in 1987, but by 1997, 72 percent of cities reached the wall goal. We now shift our focus to the examination of employment patterns in state government bureaucracies. SEX-BASED OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION AMONG ADMINISTRATORS IN U.S. STATE BUREAUCRACIES Table 4.3 reports the indicators of occupational segregation for statelevel administrative personnel by year and functional policy area. Our primary interest is in how states perform in the area of sex-based occupational

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Table 4.3 Indicators of State Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators

Goal for “wall” is 30% female employees. The wall goal statistic is the percentage of states that reach the goal.

segregation/gender balance. As with municipal governments, our unit of analysis is the functional area in each state. Accordingly, in order to test the glass-wall and gender-balance hypotheses we focus most of our attention on the percentage of states with administrative workforces in each functional policy area that reach the benchmark (or wall goal) of 30 percent women. In table 4.3, just as we did for municipalities, we also report by year for each functional area the (1) median percentage of women among state administrative workforces and (2) percentage of all-male workforces. Distributive Functions Sex-based occupational segregation among administrators is pervasive in highways and natural resources/parks and recreation. In 1997 only 3


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out of 47 states (roughly 6 percent) reached the wall goal among administrators in highway department workforces, and the median state’s percentage of women among administrative cadres was only 14 percent. In the same year in agencies included in the natural resources/parks and recreation function only 7 out of 49 states reached the benchmark for gender balance. Furthermore, neither of these functions shows much over time movement toward gender balance between 1987 and 1997. In sum, the indicators for these functions provide clear evidence in support of the glass-wall hypothesis. In the community development function patterns of occupational segregation are less pervasive, with approximately half of the states (52 percent) in 1987 and nearly two-thirds (64 percent) in 1997 reaching or surpassing the wall goal of 30 percent female. The median state’s administrative workforce in community development was 34 percent female in 1997. As we pointed out in the municipal government analysis, there is less sex-based occupational segregation in community development than in highways and streets. Although community development embodies a clear distributive component, some of the missions in this function, most notably open space, beautification, and preservation policies, are not likely to be of critical interest to traditional banking and real estate interests, interests typically dominated by men. Furthermore, a few agency programs in community development focus on redistributive policy issues (for example, business redevelopment in low income areas), and thus, are not likely to exhibit high levels of sex-based occupational segregation. We also observe that patterns of sex-based occupational segregation in natural resources/parks and recreation vary greatly by level of government with far greater shares of administrative positions going to women in municipal government vis-à-vis state government. The difference in sexbased employment records may be due to the fact that state-level agencies in natural resources/park and recreation include a large number of law enforcement personnel (such as fish and game wardens), biologists, and other types of scientists, professions likely dominated by men whereas local parks departments focus on management of programs that do not require large numbers of law enforcement personnel (a function often accomplished through local police departments) or scientists. Many municipal government park departments focus on management of playgrounds, small parks, and swimming pools. Also, pay is likely to be higher for the state positions in parks and natural resources.

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Regulatory Functions In chapter 2 we hypothesize that women will not be well-represented among administrative personnel in regulatory agencies that perform traditional policing functions, and furthermore, that we will observe little growth in the percentage of women among these administrative workforces. Although we examined fire departments at the municipal level, at the state level most fire agencies dropped out of the analysis when we omitted functional areas within states with fewer than five administrators. It is worth noting, however, that a 1997 study found no women appointed to head fire protection agencies at the state level (Riccucci and Saidel 1997). Unlike state fire departments, most states report a police function with substantial numbers of employees. In only a few states—4 out of 46—did state level police agencies achieve the wall goal among administrative personnel in 1987. The indicators reported in table 4.3 for percent of allmale administrative cadres show some improvement between 1987 and 1997 as the percent of all-male administrative workforces in state police agencies decreased from 35 to 13 percent. Although the median state’s workforce was 15 percent women in 1997 (somewhat higher than in 1987), only 4 out of 48 states achieved the benchmark for gender balance among police administrators. Though less pervasive than in police, occupational segregation among administrative personnel in corrections departments is still significant in a majority of states—and tends to be greater than segregation in municipal corrections agencies. Between 1987 and 1997 the percentage of states that reached the wall goal in corrections increased from 8 to 17 percent, and the median state’s female workforce share among administrators increased from 15 to 24 percent. Even with this temporal improvement, we wish to emphasize that approximately 83 percent of states, 40 out of 48, do not reach the wall goal among corrections administrators by 1997. The results support our glass-wall hypothesis, which posits pervasive sex-based occupational segregation in police and slightly less segregation in corrections. Moreover, consistent with our hypothesized relationships we uncover only marginal movement towards gender balance among administrative workforces in state-level police agencies. In utilities and transportation there is little decrease in the level of sexbased occupational segregation among administrators between 1987 and 1997, but overall there is less segregation than we observe in state-level policing agencies. Approximately 20 to 30 percent of states reach the wall


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goal in any given year and the median state’s administrative workforce has remained about 20 percent female for the ten-year time period under examination. Therefore our observations for utilities and transportation generally support the glass-wall hypothesis. Redistributive Functions The gender-balance hypothesis predicts that women will be wellrepresented among administrative ranks in redistributive agencies. The results reported in table 4.3 indicate (1) support for the gender-balance hypothesis, and (2) trends toward greater gender balance in state level agencies with redistributive policy commitments. A majority of states’ health agencies are gender-balanced and there is a clear trend toward greater gender balance (from 58 percent in 1987 to 88 percent in 1997). In the last year of our data set, 1997, the median administrative workforce in health was 46 percent female. A much greater percentage of states reach the wall goal in public welfare agencies; in these agencies employment profiles show dramatic movement toward gender balance over time as the percentage of states reaching the wall goal grows from 74 percent in 1987 to 96 percent in 1997. As we expected, state administrative workforces in hospitals likewise indicate relatively high levels of female representation (82 percent of states reach the wall goal in 1997). On the other hand, less than a third of state administrative workforces in employment security reach the wall goal in 1987, but by 1997, 73 percent of states employed gender-balanced administrative workforces in employment security. The administrative employment patterns in housing do not provide clear support for the gender-balance hypothesis. Even though there is a moderate trend toward gender balance between 1987 and 1997, by 1997 only about one-half of the states reach the wall goal. With the exception of housing agencies, then, our findings indicate clear support for (1) the genderbalance hypothesis in redistributive agencies, and (2) the proposition that through the 1980s and 1990s increasing numbers of women gained access to administrative positions in departments with redistributive policy commitments. Although these trends provide some encouraging news for women’s employment progress, our enthusiasm is muted by the fact that salaries tend to be relatively lower in redistributive agencies. Furthermore, as Lowi (1985) observes, agencies with redistributive policy commitments, as a general rule, are the most centralized and rule-bound. Moreover, middle—and upper—level managers in state redistributive agencies typically have limited administrative discretion, describe their leadership

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style as managing by the book, and serve clienteles comprised primarily of other women (Lowi 1985; Newman 1994). Financial Administration and General Control Agencies included in the financial administration and general control functions have a diverse range of policy missions. In many states the office of treasurer, auditor, and comptroller are reported in this function as are all judicial agencies. The summary statistics indicate that administrative workforces in financial administration and general control became much more gender balanced between 1987, when 27 percent of states reached the wall goal, and 1997, when 73 percent of states reached the goal. In 1997, the median state’s administrative cadre in this function was 35 percent female, indicating that more than one-half of the states reach the wall goal. We now turn to an examination of glass walls among state level professional work forces. SEX-BASED OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION AMONG PROFESSIONALS IN STATE BUREAUCRACIES Distributive Functions In highways and natural resources/parks and recreation sex-based occupational segregation is not as pervasive as it is among state administrative workforces, but fairly substantial levels of segregation do exist (see table 4.4). In highways, as late as 1997, only 10 percent of states reach the wall goal—and the median state’s professional workforce in highways is comprised of 21 percent women. Between 1987 and 1997 professional workforces in natural resources/parks and recreation became much less gendersegregated as the percentage of states reaching the wall goal increases from 8 to 37 percent. However, by 1997 a large percentage of states—63 percent—still does not reach the 30 percent benchmark for gender balance in natural resources/parks and recreation. Far less sex-based occupational segregation exists in community development than in agencies in other distributive functions. Thirty-one out of 33 states (94 percent) reach the wall goal among their professional community development cadres in 1997. To sum up, despite the better performance of state distributive agencies in the area of professional workforces compared to administrative ones, and despite trends toward greater gender balance over time, we still find some support for the glass-wall hypothesis in highways and natural


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Table 4.4 Indicators of State Level Sex-Based Occupational Segregation by Year and Functional Area: Professionals

Goal for “wall” is 30% female employees. The wall goal statistic is the percentage of states that reach the goal.

resources/parks and recreation. By contrast, our examination of professional workforces in agencies included in the community development function provides no support for the glass-wall hypothesis. Regulatory Functions Professionals included in the police function are made up primarily of individuals with the rank of captain and lieutenant (EEOC Form 164). The indicators reported in table 4.4 show that state level professional workforces in police have made progress toward gender balance. Only 17 percent of professional police workforces reached the wall goal in 1987, but by 1997, 67 percent of states (32 out of 48) reach the benchmark for gender balance. Although we cannot confirm this with the data in hand, we think it is likely that a considerable portion of the progress in reducing sex-

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based occupational segregation in police is due to a nationwide trend toward creation of non-traditional policing programs that focus on new policy areas such as community relations or victims’ advocacy (McCabe and Stream 2000). As we expected, professional cadres in the state-level corrections function are much more gender balanced than they are in police. In corrections, 94 percent of states (45 out of 48) reach or surpass the wall goal by 1997. This pattern of gender balance is encouraging, but we wish to emphasize once more that, on average, salaries in police are higher than those in corrections agencies (Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999). The data support the generalization that the female share of positions is inversely related to the salary levels of both women and men working in those agencies (among others see Pfeffer and Davis-Blake 1987; Baron and Newman 1989; Lewis and Nice 1994; Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999). Redistributive Functions The summary statistics reported in table 4.4 indicate strong support for the gender-balance hypothesis among state-level professional workforces in agencies with redistributive policy commitments. By 1997, all states reach the benchmark for gender balance in public welfare, hospitals, and employment security—and 48 out of 49 states meet or surpass the wall goal in health agencies. Even in the most poorly performing redistributive function, housing, 19 out of 21 states employed gender-balanced professional workforces in 1997. Financial Administration and General Control Professional workforces included in state agencies in the financial administration and general control function are as gender-balanced as professional workforces in redistributive agencies. The indicators in table 4.4 show that by 1997 fully 100 percent of reporting states reached or surpassed the benchmark for gender balance—and the median state’s professional workforce was 49 percent female. REFINING WALL CLASSIFICATIONS: ABSENT/SOFT, MODERATE, OR HARD WALLS Administrators In this section we refine our wall definitions by further classifying glass walls into three categories (absent/soft, moderate, or hard). Our purpose is


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to (1) provide a more detailed portrait of sex-based occupational segregation and (2) lay the groundwork for the analysis of the relationship between glass walls and glass ceilings, which we will briefly introduce in chapter 7. We classify glass walls for the first and last years of our data set, 1987 and 1997, by job category and functional policy area. As discussed in chapter 3, the operational definition of walls is based on the female share of the administrative and professional workforces in each functional policy area. If the female share ranges from 0.00 to 0.15 we refer to them as strong walls. If the female share is greater than 0.15 but less than 0.30 we refer to walls as moderate. If female job share equals or exceeds 0.30 walls are classified as weak or absent. Agencies have eroding walls if, over time, the representation of women improves in the agency so that the walls might be said to become weaker. Table 4.5 presents the categories for the strength of glass walls for municipal and state level administrators by functional policy area for 1987 and 1997. As we would expect, the results are roughly consistent with what we observe with the simple dichotomous cutoff of 30 percent (see tables 4.1 through 4.4). However, by splitting the sample of cities and states that do not achieve the wall goal into two categories, moderate and strong walls (see table 4.5), we gain additional new insights into the employment records of cities and states. For instance, although the performance of cities and states is quite poor in streets and highways, relative to cities, a much greater percentage of states show evidence of eroding glass walls at the administrative level in streets and highways (more than 40 percent of states are classified as having moderate walls in 1997). Also, even though 96 percent of states fail to reach the wall goal in parks among their administrative workforces, a far greater percentage of states show evidence of moderate walls in 1997 (55 percent) than they did in 1987 (23 percent), again suggesting the erosion of glass walls in parks. State and municipal police departments also indicate moderate levels of improvement over time as far fewer cities and states show evidence of hard walls in 1997 than they did in 1987. Nevertheless, approximately onehalf of the states and one half of the cities still indicate evidence of hard walls among their administrative cadres in police. This is not surprising if we consider the fact that administrative positions in police departments include only those positions with the rank of major and above (EEOC, Form 164, 1987–97), and that police departments typically have been slow to incorporate women into leadership positions. The majority of cities also show evidence of hard walls in streets and highways, fire, and utilities and transportation for both 1987 and 1997.

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Table 4.5 Strength of Glass Walls in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Officials and Administrators

Functions are classified by the percent of females in the function.

And although the record of states in the area of fire is comparable to that of cities, state administrative cadres in streets/highways and utilities/transportation indicate strong evidence of becoming less sex-segregated between 1987 and 1997, as glass walls appear to be eroding at a faster rate in states than in cities in these two functional areas. Furthermore in these


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Table 4.6 Strength of Glass Walls in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Professionals


functional areas states are much more likely to be characterized by moderately hard walls whereas cities are more likely to show evidence of hard walls. As we might expect, the relatively small number of cities and states that do not reach the wall goal in redistributive functions are more likely to show evidence of moderately hard walls than hard glass walls. It is only in the housing function that we observe a fairly high percentage of hard walls

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among administrative workforces (that is, 32 percent of cities and 13 percent of states). Professionals Table 4.6 presents the categories for strength of glass walls among municipal and state level professional workforces. As we would expect, it is generally the case that there are far fewer glass walls among professional workforces than among administrative workforces in cities and states. A large number of cities in 1997, however, still indicated evidence of hard walls among professional workforces in streets, police, fire, and utilities/transportation. Relatively speaking states perform much better than do cities in these functional areas. By 1997 neither cities nor states showed evidence of glass walls among their professional workforces in corrections, welfare, hospitals, health, housing, financial administration and general control, and employment security. Thus, at the level of professional workforces these functional areas show no evidence of sex-based occupational segregation. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION Our analysis of sex-based occupational segregation in municipal and state agencies provides empirical support for the theoretical arguments made by Lowi (1985). Municipal and state government agencies with distributive and regulatory policy commitments typically employ administrative workforces characterized by high levels of sex-based segregation—and generally, administrative workforces in these agencies have become only slightly more gender balanced over time. The record of cities and states tends to be better among professional workforces, especially in natural resources/parks and recreation, police, community development, and corrections. In highways and fire, however, a high level of sex-based occupational segregation among professionals persists alongside a pattern of relatively modest improvements over time. On the other hand, we find strong support for the hypothesis of gender balance among both administrative and professional workforces in municipal and state agencies with redistributive policy commitments. We emphasize, however, that salary levels in redistributive agencies tend to be lower than those in other agencies, and that levels of discretion provided to managerial personnel in these agencies tend to be lower. Furthermore, our use of a conservative cut point of 30 percent tends to overestimate the incidence of gender balance for all types of agencies. In


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other words, operational definitions of parity based on an equal share of jobs (that is, approximately 50 percent) would produce a portrait of agency gender profiles that is more inequitable than we present in tables 4.1 through 4.6. In the next chapter we seek to determine empirically whether the presence and/or absence of glass ceilings in cities and states varies by functional policy area and we seek to classify ceilings, as we did glass walls, as absent/weak, moderate, or strong.

Chapter 5

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF GLASS CEILINGS AND SEX-BASED SALARY DISPARITIES IN MUNICIPAL AND STATE BUREAUCRACIES

This chapter presents analysis that empirically determines (1) whether or not glass ceilings are present at the municipal and state levels for administrative positions and (2) the presence and extent of sex-based salary disparities among the different policy types and functions of municipal and state level professional workforces. Consistent with the analytic framework used in the previous chapter we sort the functional policy areas included on the EEOC’s EEO-4 form into Lowi’s policy categories. The empirical analysis of the various functional areas is presented in three parts: (1) examination of the percentage (and number) of administrative and professional workforces that are all-male; (2) determination of the percentage of cities and states that show evidence of glass ceiling impediments and; (3) further disaggregation/classification of glass ceilings as either absent/weak, moderate, or strong. We conduct each portion of the analysis first for municipal governments, and then, for state governments. We first turn to the analysis of municipal functions with all-male administrative workforces. ALL-MALE WORKFORCES AND GLASS CEILINGS IN MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES: OFFICIALS AND ADMINISTRATORS We begin the empirical analysis of glass ceilings with an examination of the percentage (and number) of municipal administrative workforces that

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are all-male. Even though discrimination may (and probably does) exist in some functional areas within cities, there can be no empirical basis for arguing that glass ceilings exist in agencies that do not employ any female administrators. Accordingly, our operational measure of glass ceilings, the ceiling ratio, requires that a department employ both men and women. We thus restrict our sample to such functional areas. In 1997, the functional areas within cities with the highest percentage of all-male administrative workforces include fire (77 percent), streets and highways (47 percent), utilities and transportation (28 percent), sanitation and sewage (26 percent), and police (22 percent). These findings are by themselves important because despite continued calls for increased diversity in municipal agencies they strongly suggest that these agencies have the most egregious, remarkably poor records of hiring/promoting women into administrative leadership positions. Based on the relatively poor records in these functional areas we expect that the most compelling evidence for the presence of glass ceiling effects would be uncovered in these departments. GLASS CEILINGS IN MUNICIPAL DEPARTMENTS We now turn to the empirical examination of glass ceilings in departments that employ male and female administrators. Our empirical analysis of administrative level glass ceilings by functional policy area and year focuses on (1) the percentage of cities that reach the ceiling goal of 0.67 (as discussed in chapter 3), and (2) the median city’s ceiling ratio within each functional area. Distributive Functions As expected, table 5.1 indicates strong evidence of sex-based salary disparities among administrative workforces in some traditionally maleoriented departments: streets and highways, sanitation and sewage, and utilities and transportation. Fewer than 10 percent of cities reach the ceiling goal in 1997 in these three functions and the median cities have ceiling ratios of less than 0.15. In the majority of administrative workforces, even after controlling for the number of women and men in the agency, men are about seven times more likely to be in the top 25 percent of salaries than are women, a finding consistent with our expectation that the few women employed in these agencies are concentrated in the lower level administrative positions.

EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF GLASS CEILINGS

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Table 5.1 Indicators of Municipal Level Glass Ceilings by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators

Goal for “ceiling” is .67. The ceiling-goal statistic is the percentage of cities that reach that goal. The ceiling ratio (median) is computed by dividing the percentage of women in the top 25% of the salary rankings by the percentage of men in the top 25% of salary rankings.

We also find evidence of glass ceilings among administrative workforces in community development and natural resources/parks and recreation; however, in relative terms the incidence of ceilings is not quite as widespread as in other distributive functions. The indicators for the ceiling goal show some improvement in community development—only 11 percent of cities reach the ceiling goal in 1987, but by 1995, 25 percent of cities reach the goal. The N drops from 140 to 88 primarily due to the fact that after 1995 cities under 1000 employees were no longer required to report by functional area; this change also likely accounts for the sizeable decrease in the percentage of cities reaching the ceiling goal between 1995 and 1997. From 1993 through 1997 the median city’s ceiling ratio in community development remained constant at 0.33. In natural resources/parks and recreation in 1997 only 22 percent of cities with mixed-sex administrative workforces operated without glass ceiling impediments. Thus, in spite of the growing number of potential (female) candidates for administrative positions in recreational services (see Arnold and Shinew 1997),

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nearly 80 percent of cities with mixed-sex workforces indicate evidence of glass ceiling impediments in natural resources/parks and recreation. Regulatory Functions Based on summary statistics reported in table 5.1 it is clear that glass ceilings among agency administrators in police and fire departments are even less penetrable than those in distributive agencies. Among the sample of cities that employ women in administrative positions in police and fire departments, at most 7 percent of cities (six out of 84 in 1991 in police) reach the ceiling goal of 0.67. Furthermore, the median city’s ceiling ratio in police and fire is typically zero, indicating that even though these departments employ some women (at least one) in administrative ranks, they tend to be concentrated largely (or exclusively) in the lower salary ranges. Police and fire administrators (as reported on the EEO-4 form) are at the rank of major and above. Because ceiling ratios can not be computed if there are no women in the department, ratios computed for each functional area must include at least one woman among their administrative workforce. Very few cities—13 to 16 depending on the year under examination— employ mixed-sex administrative workforces in corrections departments. Corrections departments show far less evidence of glass ceiling impediments than do police and fire departments. It should be noted, however, that this finding is not evidence of significant progress for women because (1) only a small number of cities report employees in correction, and (2) pay scales in corrections departments tend to be much lower than those in police and fire departments (see Miller, Kerr, and Reid 1999; Reid, Kerr, and Miller 2000). Redistributive Functions Although the evidence for the presence of glass ceilings among administrative workforces in redistributive functions is not as compelling as that for distributive and regulatory functions (see table 5.1), our data suggest that glass ceilings continue to exist in many cities. In the redistributive policy area the percentage of cities reaching the goal varies between 37 percent (health in 1989) and 80 percent (hospitals in 1993). In the functional areas of welfare and hospitals, the median city achieves salary parity in the top administrative positions (ceiling ratio = 1) in 1997, but in this same year the median city’s ceiling ratio in the


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health function was 0.50. This essentially means that in the typical (or middle) city (after controlling for the number of women and men administrators in the function) the percentage of men in the top 25 percent of salary ranges is larger than the percentage of women in the top 25 percent of salary ranges by a ratio of 2 to 1. Even though women are generally well represented in redistributive agencies, in a large number of municipalities they face the prospect of glass ceiling impediments at the highest administrative levels. Financial Administration and General Control and Housing As we indicated in earlier chapters, these departments have mixed policy missions and cannot be precisely fitted into Lowi’s policy typology. The financial administration and general control function, includes agencies with jurisdiction over budgets, taxation, human resources, affirmative action, legal matters, and a host of other functions essential to support the day-to-day operation of city governments and to the support of city elected officials. As late as 1997, only 17 percent of cities reach the ceiling goal in this set of politically powerful agencies and the median city’s ceiling ratio is 0.37, indicating that women are poorly represented at the top administrative levels in well over one-half of the cites in our sample. Again, this may provide some evidence for Daley’s (1994) notion of sticky floors in which women are in administrative positions that do not readily prepare them for advancement to higher levels of administrative policy making. The summary statistics in housing are similar to those reported for financial administration and general control as only 20 percent of cities reach the ceiling goal in 1997. Moreover, the median city’s ceiling ratio is 0.39, suggesting that in the typical city men outnumber women in the top 25 percent of salary ranges by a ratio of about 5 to 2. The analysis suggests that glass ceiling impediments for administrators are strongest and most pervasive across cities in distributive and regulatory agencies, the two types of agencies most likely to show evidence of glass walls. Although cities approach gender balance in their redistributive workforces, suggesting the absence of glass walls, we uncover evidence of glass ceiling impediments at the highest administrative level in redistributive agencies also. We now turn our attention to sex-based salary disparities among professional workforces in U.S. cities and begin with a quick examination of departments with all-male professional workforces.

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ALL-MALE WORKFORCES AND SALARY DISPARITIES IN MUNICIPAL BUREAUCRACIES: PROFESSIONALS The distinction between salary disparities and glass ceilings is an important one. Most conceptual definitions of glass ceilings include only the very top administrative ranks—and consequently, for most agencies and departments most professional positions are probably not included among these top ranks. Although there may be some important exceptions to this generalization, we do not pursue this research topic here. Sex-based salary disparities among professionals is a topic worthy of empirical examination because in many departments and agencies professional employees exercise a great deal of policy influence. Consequently, these are important personnel to examine when assessing representational issues. Chief executives often rely on professionals as well as administrators to formulate policies and effect political goals; high-level professional staffs can thus assume considerable policy shaping influence in some functional areas. Furthermore, in those functions that have few administrators relative to the number of professionals, it may well be the case that something akin to a glass ceiling can exist at the professional level because many of the most influential policy-making positions—along with many high salaried positions—in the agency are likely professional positions. We begin our analysis of municipal level professional workforces with a brief discussion of functional areas that were all-male in 1997. Compared to administrators, and noting our caveat about the ceiling and salary disparity distinctions, the differences between the two groups of managers are quite remarkable. Only three functional areas indicated significant numbers of allmale professional workforces—streets and highways, 30 out of 155 cities; fire, 139 out of 286 cities; and police, 106 out of 413 cities. Each function with all-male professional workforces was omitted from the analysis before calculating the level of salary disparities among professional workforces in municipal government departments. We now turn to an examination of distributive functions. As discussed above, even though we still refer to our measure as the ceiling ratio we do not claim that glass ceilings exist at the professional level. Rather, we interpret this term more broadly to suggest the importance of female representation in high-level, policy shaping professional positions in municipal departments/functional areas. Distributive Functions Among municipal level distributive functions we find evidence to indicate widespread sex-based salary disparities in streets and highways, sani-

Table 5.2 Indicators of Municipal Level Sex-Based Salary Disparities by Year and Functional Area: Professionals


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tation and sewage, and utilities and transportation. The summary statistics reported in table 5.2 show that the nature of salary disparities in streets and highways has remained remarkably constant with the median city’s ceiling ratios ranging from a low of 0.08 in 1987 to a high of 0.14 in 1993—and the percentage of cities reaching the ceiling goal ranges from 3 percent in 1987 to 7 percent in 1997. The patterns among professional workforces in sanitation and sewage and utilities and transportation indicate very little overtime improvement and present evidence of widespread and persistent sex-based salary inequities between female and male professional employees, patterns quite similar to the pattern reported in streets and highways. In the remaining distributive functions—community development and natural resources/parks and recreation—there also is evidence to indicate widespread salary disparities; however, these disparities are not nearly as great as those observed in streets, sanitation, and utilities. The indicators show some over time improvement in natural resources/parks and recreation. As recently as 1997, 53 percent of cities reached the ceiling goal of 0.67—and the median city had a ceiling ratio of 0.75. However, in community development only 29 percent of professional workforces reached the ceiling goal in 1997, and the median city’s ceiling ratio was 0.48, indicating that in the typical city, after controlling for the number of women and men in the professional workforce, men are twice as likely as women to hold positions in the top 25 percent of salaries. Regulatory Functions Among agency professionals in police and fire departments, sex-based salary disparities are even greater than those found in distributive agencies. Quite a few cities employ at least one woman in professional positions in police and fire departments; however, it is clear from the indicators reported in table 5.2 that these women are concentrated in the lower salary ranges. The percentage of cities reaching the ceiling goal ranges from 0 percent to a high of 4 percent (police in 1993, 1995, 1997) and median city’s ceiling ratios range from 0.00 (1987) to a high of 0.09 (police in 1993). These findings are most likely a manifestation of the historical record in police and fire that has proven to be disadvantageous to women—and a reflection of the fact that women have only recently been promoted into the professional ranks, comprised of captains and lieutenants, and thus, are still concentrated in the low end of salary ranges. Even though women fare better in the corrections function, on average, only about 30 cities a year report professional workforces in corrections.


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In 1995, 58 percent of cities (or 17 out of 31) reached the goal of 0.67 and the median city’s ceiling ratio was 1.00, indicating that in 1995 at least onehalf of cities’ female women professionals achieved salary parity with their male colleagues. Financial Administration/General Control and Housing Large numbers of cities report professional employees in financial administration and general control (ranging from a high of 588 in 1995 and a low of 227 in 1997). The drop in the N is due to the fact that beginning in 1997 (as mentioned before) cities with fewer than 1000 employees were no longer required to file EEO-4 reports by functional policy area. The record of municipalities, in the aggregate, has improved over time. While only 36 percent of cities reached the ceiling goal in 1987, from 1991 through 1997 about half of the reporting cities reached the ceiling goal. Moreover, the ceiling goal for the median city increased from 0.50 in 1987 to 0.68 in 1997, indicating modest improvements in the sex-based salary distributions among professional workforces. The summary indicators for housing also show modest levels of overtime change among professional workforces; however, on the whole fairly pervasive sex-based salary disparities continue to exist. Even as late as 1997, only 38 percent of cities reached the ceiling goal—and, in the median city, men outnumbered women (after controlling for their numbers in the function) by a ratio of 2 to 1 in the top 25 percent of salary ranges. Among professionals in municipal bureaucracies, salary disparities, while somewhat attenuated over time, continue to exist. Given the importance of these employees to formulating and implementing policies in settings that recently have undergone considerable changes in the wake of management reforms in many cities, these findings are quite disturbing. It suggests that despite the rhetoric of reform, power still remains largely concentrated in the hands of the same groups. ALL-MALE WORKFORCES AND GLASS CEILINGS IN STATE BUREAUCRACIES: OFFICIALS AND ADMINISTRATORS We begin the empirical analysis of administrative workforces in state bureaucracies with an examination of the percentage and number of states that have all-male workforces within functional areas. Among profes-

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sional ranks all-male departments have all but vanished, but some statelevel distributive and regulatory functions continued to employ all-male administrative cadres. In utilities and transportation from 1987 to 1997 little change occurred with seven states (or 20 percent of departments) still reporting all-male administrative composition in 1997. Although police departments have shown considerable improvement over the observed period—the number of all-male administrative units declined between 1987 and 1997 from 16 to 6 states or from 36 percent to 13 percent of departments, respectively—it continues to be one of the functional units with a sizeable number of all-male administrative units. We now turn to an examination of glass ceiling effects among administrative units in state agencies. Just as we did in the analysis of municipal government agencies we restrict the empirical examination of glass ceilings to functional policy areas that include both male and female administrators. Distributive Functions In highways/streets and natural resources/parks and recreation none of the states reach the ceiling goal between 1987 and 1995. In 1997, one state out of 45 finally reached the ceiling goal at the administrative level in highways. The median states in highways and natural resources/parks typically weigh in with ceiling goals between 0.00 and 0.15, indicating the presence of pervasive sex-based salary disparities. The results therefore support the interpretation that in state agencies within these functional areas women still face very strong glass ceilings that impede their progress to top administrative positions. On the other hand, community development agencies in the states fare better—in 1997, 18 percent of states reached the ceiling goal and the median state’s ceiling ratio was 0.43, indicating that in the top 50 percent of salary ranges, after controlling for the number of women and men in the administrative workforce, men outnumbered women by a ratio of about 5 to 2 in the typical (median) state. Our summary indicators provide evidence in support of the glass-ceiling hypothesis for female administrators in state agencies included in the distributive functions, but the evidence for glass ceiling impediments is even more compelling among regulatory agencies. Regulatory Functions In general, glass ceilings among agency administrators in police, corrections, and utilities and transportation are even less penetrable than are ceilings

Table 5.3 Indicators of State Level Glass Ceilings by Year and Functional Area: Officials and Administrators


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in agencies included in the distributive functions. Only a handful of states employ women in the top administrative positions in these agencies and in only one instance (utilities and transportation in 1993) do more than 10 percent of states reach the ceiling goal. Although police and corrections demonstrate some over-time improvement—between 1987 and 1997 the median state’s ceiling ratio for police increased from 0.05 to 0.14 and for corrections it increased from 0.16 to 0.28—the pace of change is extremely slow. Redistributive Functions Due primarily to the policy commitments of redistributive agencies, in chapter 2 we suggested that women would be better represented among administrative ranks in such agencies. As expected, relative to regulatory and distributive functions, state agencies with redistributive missions show evidence of fewer glass ceiling impediments; however, our data also suggest that glass ceilings continue to exist in many states. The record of state redistributive agencies is certainly much poorer than that of municipal departments with corresponding responsibilities. We offer one explanation for these discrepancies. Positions in state agencies typically pay better and are more prestigious than comparable positions in municipal agencies. Thus, competition between women and men for these positions is likely to be more intense at the state level than at the municipal level. In all redistributive functions except for employment security, from half to two-thirds of the states in 1997 reached the ceiling goal. Health, welfare, and hospitals have demonstrated a fair amount of over-time improvement—and by 1997 the median states in these functions had ceiling ratios of 0.67 or better. In employment security, however, as late as 1997, only 25 percent of states reached the goal and the median state’s ceiling ratio was 0.52, suggesting that after controlling for the number of male and female administrators, men were twice as likely as women to hold positions in the top 50 percent of salary ranges in their agency. At the highest administrative level, glass ceilings are less pervasive in state redistributive agencies than in other types of agencies, but on the other hand, women continue to be vastly underrepresented in these ranks, especially in agencies included in the hospital and employment security functions. Financial Administration/General Control and Housing Agencies included in the financial administration and general control function, as we have already discussed, include a diverse set of policy mis-


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sions ranging from judicial offices to the offices of treasurer, auditor, and comptroller. The ceiling indicators reported at the bottom of table 5.3 show that administrative workforces included in this function resemble administrative workforces employed in distributive functions. Although median ceiling ratios improved slightly over the ten-year period under examination, by 1997 only two of 49 states reached the ceiling goal and the median state’s ceiling ratio was 0.42. Thus, despite the progress that women have made over the last several years in the employment fields of law and finance, this progress does not appear to have resulted in the erosion/weakening of glass ceiling impediments in the majority of state level public sector judicial and finance agencies. In these agencies, after controlling for the number of women and men in the function, on average, in 1997, men were two and one half times more likely to be in the top 50 percent of salary ranges. The percentage of states meeting or surpassing the ceiling goal for administrators in housing has grown appreciably between 1987 and 1997. Yet, by 1997 just over one half of the states (56 percent or 9 out of 16) still failed to reach the goal. Moreover, the ceiling ratio for the median state in housing (0.39) is very similar to the ratio in financial administration, and it indicates that in the top 50 percent of salary ranges even after controlling for the number of women and men administrators in the function men outnumber women by a ratio of about 5 to 2. SEX-BASED SALARY DISPARITIES AMONG PROFESSIONALS IN STATE GOVERNMENT The few all-male professional workforces that remain in 1997 are in distributive and regulatory functions, but this never constitutes more than one state per function. Table 5.4 reports the indicators of salary disparities for state-level professional personnel by year and functional policy area. We generally expect to observe less evidence of sex-based salary disparities among professional workforces than among administrative workforces. Distributive Functions The extent of sex-based salary disparities among professionals in highways and natural resources/parks and recreation is similar to that for administrators. In most years for which we have data available not a single state reaches the ceiling goal of 0.67. Furthermore, median state ceiling goals vary from 0.07 (highways in 1987) to 0.30 (natural resources/ parks and recreation 1997). By contrast, employment patterns in commu-

Table 5.4 Indicators of State Level Sex-Based Salary Disparities by Year and Functional Area: Professionals



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nity development have improved significantly over time. In 1997, 52 percent of states reached the goal and the median state’s ceiling ratio is a respectable 0.70. Regulatory Functions Sex-based salary disparities among professionals in state policing agencies have diminished over time and the percentage of states reaching the ceiling goal in police has grown from 2 percent (or one state) in 1987 to 21 percent (or ten states) in 1997. In 1997 the median state’s ceiling ratio was 0.32 (up from 0.14 in 1987), which means that in the typical state, after controlling for the numbers of women and men in professional workforces, men still outnumbered women in the top 50 percent of salary categories by a ratio of more than 3 to 1. Similar salary patterns exist in utilities and transportation with slow improvements over time as the percentage of states reaching the goal grew from 3 percent to 15 percent between 1987 and 1997. Between 1987 and 1997 the ceiling ratio for median states in utilities and transportation has remained about the same at nearly 0.30. As was the case with professional corrections workforces in cities, these state agencies tend to perform better than do traditional policing agencies, showing significant decreases in the levels of sex-based salary disparities over time. Although only 15 percent of states reached the ceiling goal in 1987, by 1997, 46 percent of the states (22 out of 48) reached the goal. The median states’ ceiling goals (that is, 0.43 in 1987 and 0.66 in 1997) also indicate that sex-based salary disparities have, as a general rule, been decreasing among professional workforces in corrections. Redistributive Functions Consistent with our hypothesis there is no evidence of pervasive sexbased salary disparities among professional workforces in redistributive functions. By 1997, over 90 percent of states achieved sex-based salary parity in health, welfare, hospitals, and employment security. Because many of these agencies include professions that traditionally have been dominated by women such as registered nurses, dieticians, social workers, and counselors, this result is not surprising. Also, because women have built high levels of seniority in these positions (and because relatively fewer men are employed in these types of jobs) the patterns consistently generate ceiling ratios among state level professional workforces that are

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greater than one—and in the cases of welfare and hospitals median ceiling ratios exceed 2.00. Financial Administration/General Control and Housing By 1997, over 60 percent of states reach or surpass the ceiling goal among professional workforces in financial administration and general control, up from a mere 19 percent in 1987. Furthermore, the median state’s ceiling ratio in 1997 (0.74) indicates that in the top salary ranges, after controlling for the number of women and men in the function, men outnumber women by a ratio of only about 4 to 3. State agencies included in the housing function also have made considerable progress in reducing/eliminating sex-based salary disparities between 1987 and 1997. In 1987 only 37 percent of states (7 out of 19) met or surpassed the ceiling ratio of 0.67; however, a mere ten years later, 81 percent (17 out of 21) do—and the median state’s ceiling ratio in 1997 was 1.08 and so is roughly at parity. CLASSIFYING GLASS CEILINGS AS WEAK/ABSENT, MODERATE, OR STRONG The previous discussion has shown a wide discrepancy among state and municipal departments in their efforts to remove impediments for women to advance to the highest salaried positions in their administrative units. In this section we classify administrative workforce glass ceilings for the first and last years of our data set, 1987 and 1997, for each functional policy area as either weak/absent, moderate, or strong. As we discussed before, the purpose in classifying glass ceilings into these three categories is to (1) provide a more detailed portrait of sex-based salary disparities by splitting the sample of city and state functional areas that fail to reach the ceiling goal into moderate and hard ceilings and (2) lay the groundwork for the empirical analysis on the relationship between glass walls and glass ceilings. As discussed in chapter 3, ceilings are classified based on the relative difficulty or ease with which women are able to lay claim to a proportionate share of the highest paying (and by association) the most powerful positions in their agencies. Our operational measures of the glass ceiling classification are as follows: ceiling ratio of 0 to 0.33 is referred to as a strong/hard ceiling; a ceiling ratio greater than 0.33 but less than 0.67 is a moderate ceiling; and a ceiling ratio of 0.67 or greater is a weak/absent ceiling.


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Municipal and State Ceiling Strength Classifications Table 5.5 presents the categories for the strength/weakness of glass ceilings for municipal and state level administrative units by functional policy area for 1987 and 1997. The results are consistent with what we observe with a simple dichotomous cutoff of 0.67 for presence/absence of glass ceilings (see tables 5.1 and 5.3). When further splitting the sample of cities and states that do not achieve the ceiling goal into two categories, moderately hard and hard ceilings (see table 5.5), we gain additional insights into the employment records of cities and states. For instance, although the records of cities and states are quite poor in natural resources/parks and recreation, cities are much more likely than states to have moderately hard ceilings— and their progress between 1987 and 1997 has been greater than that of states. Also, even though in 1997 100 percent of states fail to reach the ceiling goal among administrative workforces in parks, a few more states show evidence of moderate ceilings in 1997 (8 percent) than in 1987 (2 percent). State and municipal police departments indicate only slight levels of over-time improvement as glass ceilings in these departments are likely to be hard even as late as 1997. If we consider the fact that administrative jobs in police departments include only those positions with the rank of major and above (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1987–97), and that police departments typically have been slow to incorporate women into leadership positions, the general lack of progress at the highest level does not come as a complete surprise, but it is alarming given the increasing diversity of states and communities, recent emphases on community oriented policy making in many cities, and other changes in law-enforcement practices across many jurisdictions. The majority of cities show evidence of hard walls in police, streets and highways, fire, and utilities and transportation for both 1987 and 1997. And although the record of states in the area of fire (data not shown because of small N) is roughly comparable to the record of cities, state administrative cadres in utilities/transportation show evidence of becoming less sex-segregated between 1987 and 1997, as glass ceilings appear to be eroding at a faster rate in states than in cities in this functional area. These improvements are difficult to interpret, but might suggest increasing female enrollments/degrees in engineering programs, and/or the vacating of positions as male employees enter private sector careers (making room for female engineering professionals in the public sector). As we might expect, the relatively small number of cities and states that do not reach the ceiling goal in redistributive functions are more likely to

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Table 5.5 Strength of Glass Ceilings in State and Municipal Bureaucracies: Officials and Administrators


show evidence of moderately hard glass ceilings than hard glass ceilings; this is true in welfare, health, and hospitals regardless of level of government. Among redistributive agencies it is only in the housing function that we observe a fairly high percentage of hard ceilings at the administrative level in 1997 (that is, 42 percent of cities and 44 percent of states).


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Table 5.6 Extent of Sex-Based Salary Disparities by Year and Functional Area: Professionals

Functions are classified by the percent of females in the function.Source: Table Source note

Municipal and State Level Salary Disparities Table 5.6 presents the categories for the gap in sex-based salary disparities among municipal and state level professional workforces. Consistent with our expectations it is generally the case that there are fewer (and smaller) salary disparities among professional workforces than among

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administrative workforces in cities and states. A large number of cities in 1997, however, still indicated evidence of pervasive salary disparities among professional workforces in police, fire, sanitation, streets/highways, and utilities/transportation. As a general rule, states tend to perform slightly better than do cities in these functional areas, but despite this generalization, states still show significant evidence of sex-based salary disparities in these functions. In 1997 neither cities nor states showed much evidence of sex-based salary disparities among professional workforces in corrections, welfare, hospitals, health, and employment security (states only). SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION Our analysis of sex-based salary disparities/glass ceilings indicates that, as we hypothesized, inequities are greatest and most pervasive in agencies included in the distributive and regulatory functions—and that inequities are much more likely to occur at the administrative level than at the professional level. We interpret this evidence at the administrative level as suggestive of glass ceiling impediments. Two functions, distributive and regulatory, are the most likely functions to also show evidence of occupational segregation or glass walls (see chapter 4). Even though far less evidence of glass ceiling impediments exists at the administrative level in redistributive agencies, we do uncover evidence of glass ceilings in some cities and states, suggesting that in some municipal and state agencies included in redistributive functions, women continue to encounter difficulties in their attempt to break glass ceilings and become more fully represented at the highest administrative levels. We also find some evidence of sex-based salary disparities at the professional level suggesting that in many distributive and regulatory agencies the inclusion of women may reflect both lack of policy commitment and entrenched organizational/professional cultures as the primary reasons for the lack of progress in these areas. We wish to point out that our use of a conservative cut point for the ceiling goal of 0.67, in effect, tends to underestimate in all types of agencies the extent of sex-based salary inequities.

Chapter 6

BUREAUCRATIC REPRESENTATION OF LATINAS, AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN, AND WHITE (NON-HISPANIC) WOMEN IN MULTIETHNIC U.S. CITIES

This chapter explores the extent and nature of employment inequalities between Latinas, African American women and white (non-Hispanic) women in public sector administrative and professional positions in U.S. multiethnic cities. Through comparisons of women and men within ethnic groups, we also examine the managerial level employment patterns of socalled coethnics (for example, comparing African American women to African American men). Due in large part to extensive data limitations, many of which are discussed in chapter 3, extant studies provide only a partial picture of public sector employment profiles for sex-ethnic groups. Furthermore, as discussed in chapter 2, the employment/representative bureaucracy literature on the distribution of public sector jobs across ethnic groups controlling for sex remains limited and underdeveloped. As we discussed in chapter 1, our research questions on sex-ethnic groups are: (1) what is the ethnic distribution of female (and male) administrators and professionals in various functional policy areas in municipal government bureaucracies; and (2) is the underrepresentation of minority ethnic groups among these female (and male) administrators and professionals in various functional areas related to the policy outputs and/or organizational missions associated with those functions? To address these questions, we test the following hypotheses: (1) all groups of women will be underrepresented among administrative and professional workforces in regulatory and distributive agencies, but white women will indicate the highest levels of representation, and Latinas the lowest levels; (2) in redis-

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tributive agencies among administrative and professional workforces white women will be the most likely women’s group to reach/approach parity, African American women may approach parity in some cities and Latinas will be consistently underrepresented in redistributive agencies; (3) in distributive and regulatory agencies we expect that females from all three groups will indicate lower levels of representation than their male coethnics; (4) in redistributive agencies white females will be as well represented as white males, African American females will be better represented than African American males, and Latino males will experience higher levels of representation than will Latinas; and (5) given the historically advantageous position of white males and the historically disadvantageous position of other sex-ethnic groups, we generally expect increases over time in the representativeness ratios of the latter along with decreases among white males. In order to test these hypotheses, we must determine by department for Latinas, African American women, and white women (and for their coethnics) the following: (1) the median representativeness ratios for administrative and professional workforces in each sex-ethnic group as well as the means of the representativeness ratios for 1987 and 1997; (2) among women, which ethnic groups, on average, hold the largest and smallest shares of positions relative to their numbers in the city population; (3) among coethnics which sex holds, on average, the largest and smallest shares of administrative and professional positions relative to their numbers in the city population; and (4) the differences in the 1987 and 1997 median representativeness ratios and means of those ratios. We first present the empirical results for sex-ethnic representation among administrative workforces in multiethnic U.S. cities. Then we present the empirical results for sex-ethnic representation among professional workforces.

EMPIRICAL RESULTS Sex-Ethnic Representation among Administrative Workforces Table 6.1 reports by department for 1987 and 1997 the median representativeness ratios for administrative positions along with means for those ratios. The medians and means for Latinas and African American women indicate a pattern of substantial underrepresentation among administrative cadres in almost all municipal departments in 1997. As predicted by our hypotheses, in each functional area the median ratios for

Table 6.1 Municipal Employment Proportionality by Sex, Ethnic Group, and Department: Mean and Median Representativeness Ratios for Administrative Positions

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Latinas are either lower than those for African American women, or alternatively, the median representation ratio for both groups is 0, and the mean for African American women is higher than that for Latinas. Moreover, the difference in the means of the representativeness ratios between these groups of women is typically quite sizeable. Although white women tend to indicate larger representation ratios than women of minority ethnic background, white women are still underrepresented in most municipal departments. Their levels of underrepresentation tend to be lowest in departments with regulatory policy commitments and in the following functions with distributive policy commitments: streets/ highways, sanitation/sewage, and utilities/transportation. By contrast, white males are overrepresented among administrative ranks irrespective of functional area or year, with ratios in the median city typically approaching or exceeding 2. The only functions in which the median ratios do not approach 2 are health and housing, functions that include agencies with relatively low pay and that are reported for relatively few cities. The coethnic comparisons based on the summary statistics reported in table 6.1 show that African American males indicate higher levels of representation among administrative workforces than do African American females except in health and community development. In these two functions the mean of the ratios for African American women approach or surpass the cutoff point for parity in 1997 (community development = 0.99 and health = 1.77). In finance/administration and housing, however, the differences between African American coethnics tend to be marginal. Consistent with our expectations, Latino males are represented at higher levels than are Latinas in administrative workforces across all functions in 1997 (despite the fact that by 1997 Latino males approach parity in only one function—housing, a function that is reported for a mere 15 cities). More important perhaps is the finding from the quartile analysis (empirical analysis not shown), which indicates that although at least 5 percent of the population is of Hispanic origin in each city in 2000—and, as a matter of fact, a majority of cities included in the sample were at least 10 percent Hispanic in 2000—in at least 75 percent of these cities there are no Latinas employed as administrators within the requisite functional areas. Of the groups we examine, Latinas suffer, by far, from the lowest levels of representation. Indeed, representation of Latinas among administrative workforces is virtually nonexistent in functions that have distributive and regulatory missions. We do examine administrative workforces in some functions that include relatively few cities (analysis and summary statistics not reported

BUREAUCRATIC REPRESENTATION

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in table 6.1) such as hospitals (n = 5), welfare (n = 7), and corrections (n = 3). In these functional areas the representativeness ratios for Latinas among administrative cadres is higher than their ratios for the functions reported in table 6.1. Nevertheless, only a handful of cities report in these areas, and more importantly it is still the case that among the six sexethnic groups we examine Latinas suffer from the lowest levels of representation in each of these functions. Have levels of representation among the different sex-ethnic groups changed appreciably over time? Some empirical studies of municipallevel interethnic job competition suggest that Latino and African American gains have come primarily at the expense of whites (see McClain 1993; Kerr, Miller, and Reid 2000). Accordingly, we hypothesized an inverse relationship between the representativeness ratios of white males and those of all other sex-ethnic groups. Contrary to our expectations, however, white males do not lose much ground at the administrative level between 1987 and 1997. The summary statistics reported in table 6.1 typically show very little change in the medians or means for white males between 1987 and 1997. It is important to remember that we are measuring representation in relation to the ethnic population percentage in the city (that is, Representativeness Ratio equals percent ethnic group by sex employed in each department divided by percent ethnic group by sex in the city population as reported by the Census Bureau) and not solely by a simple percentage of each ethnic group in the agency. This distinction is significant because it is quite possible that the perception of the white male workers in these agencies may be more affected by a reduction in absolute numbers of administrative (or professional) employees of their sex and ethnic group than by their continued proportional overrepresentation in a city with a growing minority population. In other words, in some cases the symbolic impact of the slow reduction in the number of white males, replaced by traditionally disadvantaged group members, may be more emotionally powerful than the reality of continued white male employment beyond their proportions in the city. On the other hand, traditionally disadvantaged group members within these agencies may assume that the group is adequately represented when, in fact, they are becoming increasingly underrepresented as the group’s population in the city increases. In other words, employees are unlikely to be sensitive to population changes between census counts, which, of course, is reflected in the denominator employed in the representativeness ratio. At any rate, among administrative workforces white males generally have either maintained the status quo (that is, community development,

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parks, sanitation and sewage, health, finance/administration, and housing), or increased their levels of proportional representation (that is, streets, utilities/transportation, and fire). The observed patterns could be caused by a change in the distribution of administrators among sex-ethnic groups (the numerator for the representativeness ratio), a relative decline in white population percentage in the city (captured in the denominator for the ratio), or a combination of both. Regardless of which factors lead to the high levels of stability among white male managers, maintenance of the status quo is quite remarkable when we consider the nature of the set of cities included in the analysis. The majority of the cities in the sample have populations that are at least 10 percent Latino and 10 percent African American in 2000—and these cities became much more multiethnic during the 1990s. Police protection, arguably the most highly visible and political of all policy areas, is the only function in which white males in the aggregate appear to have lost significant ground among administrative ranks in a large number of cities between 1987 and 1997 (change in mean 0.17; change in median 0.52). Although this represents a step in the right direction in a high profile agency with symbolic, political, and practical significance for ethnic minorities, this progress does not have any analogues in other functional areas. Thus, the progress of traditionally disadvantaged groups relative to white males shows little breadth; it is not distributed evenly across the majority of municipal agencies. The results reported in table 6.1 demonstrate that the largest gains for African American women occur in community development, health, housing, and police agencies. Community development, health, and housing each include at least some redistributive components such as planning, public health programs, and low-rent public housing programs, respectively (see Appendix). The increase in the mean of ratios in police from 0.17 to 0.65 suggests some significant progress in the ability of African American females to lay claim to high-visibility, prestigious police positions above the rank of captain; however, this employment progress is not distributed evenly across multiethnic cities. Although the mean representativeness ratio for African American females is 0.65 in 1997, in the same year, the median city’s representation ratio for the administrative police workforce is only 0.08 for African American women. Furthermore, the city at the beginning of quartile three indicates a representativeness ratio of 0.81 (analysis not shown). This finding suggests that the increase in the mean is due to the fact that a handful of cities, approximately seven or eight (total n = 31), have ratios of near parity or greater in 1997—and that the ratios in these cities increased considerably between 1987 and 1997.


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Consequently, for police departments the median (rather than the mean) is probably a better indicator from which to generalize about the record across multiethnic cities in hiring and retaining African American women for high-level police posts. Likewise, in functions other than police, the distribution of representativeness ratios across cities for Latinas and African American women (and their coethnics) is also uneven. By contrast, the interquartile ranges (table not shown) show fairly high levels of representation for white males even in the first quartile. Thus, the ratios for white males are distributed more evenly across municipal administrative workforces irrespective of functional area. Even though white women are typically underrepresented among administrative ranks in most cities, they are the only other sexethnic group to be distributed somewhat evenly across cities and across and/or within functional areas. On the other hand, it is rare that any of the other four groups in the sample indicate representativeness ratios that are distributed evenly across cities. The summary statistics indicate that in those cases where we observe sizeable means for Latinas and African American women (and their coethnics), this is usually associated with a combination of high levels of overrepresentation in a few cities and little or no representation in most cities. We now turn our attention to the findings for sex-ethnic representation among professional workforces. Sex-Ethnic Representation among Professional Workforces Table 6.2 reports by functional policy area for 1987 and 1997 the median representativeness ratios for professional positions as well as the means for those ratios. Relative to administrative positions, professional positions are generally characterized by less discretion/policy-making power and lower pay; however, professional positions often involve the discharge of significant policy implementation responsibilities and provide a platform for moving into administrative positions As we would expect, for each of the five traditionally disadvantaged groups the representativeness ratios for professional workforces are typically higher than those for administrative workforces. And, by contrast, the representativeness ratios for white males are smaller among professional cadres than among administrative ones. Nevertheless, white males are still overrepresented among professional workforces in 1987 and 1997 in all functions except health. The professional level representativeness ratios for median cities among white males typically range from just over 1 to just over 2,

Table 6.2 Municipal Employment Proportionality by Sex, Ethnic Group, and Department: Mean and Median Representativeness Ratios for Professional Positions


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with the largest medians and means occurring in police, fire, streets/highways, sanitation/sewage, and utilities/transportation. As late as 1997, the means and medians for Latinas and African American women indicate substantial levels of underrepresentation among professional workforces in all regulatory functions and in three of the five distributive functions—again, streets/highways, sanitation/sewage, and utilities/transportation. In the remaining two distributive functions, however, African American females, on average, approach parity in 1997 among professional cadres (mean for parks = 0.81 and mean for community development = 0.82). The primary beneficiaries of policies administered by agencies in natural resources/parks and recreation (for example, parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, and zoos) are lower and middle income citizens. Again, the nature of agency-clientele relationships may affect ethnic as well as sex-based employment patterns in municipal governments. In every function except housing the ratios for white females in 1997 are greater than those for Latinas and African American females. Nevertheless, white females still suffer from very low levels of representation in sanitation/sewage, streets/highways, utilities/transportation, police, and fire, each of which are characterized by traditions of white male dominance. In health the only two groups to achieve overrepresentation in 1997 are African American women (mean = 1.48) and white women (mean = 1.64). Relative to other functions Latinas indicate their highest levels of representation in health departments, but they still remain substantially underrepresented in 1997 (mean = 0.43, median = 0.39). Based on our reading of the interethnic job competition literature, we hypothesized that over time the representativeness ratios of white males would decrease while those of other sex-ethnic groups would increase. Although our observations do not support this hypothesis in most functions, white males, on average, experience significant losses among professional workforces in sanitation/sewage, streets/highways, and utilities/ transportation. In each of these functions the mean of the representativeness ratios decreases by about 0.20 between 1987 and 1997. These losses are accompanied by strong gains for African American males in utilities/ transportation and streets/highways, and for white women in sanitation/ sewage and streets/highways. Other sizeable over-time gains among professional workforces between 1987 and 1997 are observed for African American females in parks and health, and African American and Latino males in fire and white females in community development and police. Although we observe for members of traditionally disadvantaged groups

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greater gains at the level of professional workforces than at the administrative level, white males are the only group to be consistently overrepresented in multiethnic U.S. cities among professional workforces. Furthermore, the pace of change among traditionally disadvantaged groups has been quite modest over the decade for which we have data—and in some functions these groups make marginal or no gains. This leads us to believe that the public sector employment outlook for traditionally disadvantaged groups, particularly Latinas and Latinos, is not encouraging. Unfortunately, we do not have enough information in hand to estimate accurately when, or if, traditionally disadvantaged sex-ethnic groups are likely to reach parity. However, if we entertain a couple of simple assumptions we can provide a very rough estimate of the future public sector employment progress of traditionally disadvantaged groups. For example, for purposes of discussion let us assume that the trend for the ten years from 1987 through 1997 is taken as an indicator of trends in future decades. This sort of extrapolation introduces smoothness into the estimate or time series, but given the relative shortness of our time series the options for estimation are quite limited. If we grant this assumption, it would appear that the representation ratio mean for Latina professionals in parks—a function in which African American women have significant levels of representation—will increase to 0.30 by 2007, 0.36 by 2017, and so on. While more sophisticated estimating models could be constructed, even this quick analysis should raise concerns about the future of representation in multi-ethnic cities. Unless clear policy interventions are planned, it may be that white males will continue to be overrepresented while traditionally disadvantaged groups, especially Latinas, will be seriously underrepresented in the foreseeable future. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION We generally find support for our sex-ethnic hypotheses. All groups of women tend to be underrepresented among municipal level administrative and professional workforces in regulatory and distributive agencies. Among administrative and professional personnel in agencies with redistributive policy commitments, white women typically reach parity while Latinas are extremely underrepresented. Furthermore, it is generally true that the representation ratios of male coethnics are higher than those for female coethnics in distributive and regulatory agencies. We do not, however, find widespread support for the hypothesis that white males experience proportional losses of administrative and professional positions to


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members of traditionally disadvantaged groups in multiethnic cities. Rather, we find a pattern of white male representational stability alongside few significant gains among other groups. The only exceptions to the pattern of stability among white males are administrative workforces in police, and professional workforces in sanitation, streets, and utilities where white males enjoy unusually high levels of representation. Based on our analysis of the municipal employment profiles of different sex-ethnic groups, one of the important general findings in this chapter is that in multiethnic cities bureaucracies at the municipal level—the level closest to the people—there is little evidence to show that descriptive representation will be achieved for traditionally disadvantaged groups in the near future. Their analysis of data from the 1970s leads Welch, Karnig, and Eribes (1983) to argue that patterns of discrimination against minorities and women are diminishing. Many forms of overt discrimination no longer exist (Karnig and McClain 1988), but without further and significant policy interventions we are not optimistic about the prospects for achieving parity across all sex-ethnic groups at the administrative and professional levels in municipal government bureaucracies, even in multiethnic cities. More specifically, the prospects for Latinas, African American women, and their coethnics do not look promising, especially in agencies that have primarily regulatory and distributive policy commitments. Despite decades of equal employment/affirmative action policies (beginning with passage of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972), employment profiles among administrative workforces in multiethnic cities show for members of traditionally disadvantaged groups continuing, pervasive patterns of underrepresentation, and in some cases, stagnation and even reversal. Perhaps the most remarkable finding in this study is that the extent of representation for white males at the administrative level did not, on average, change between 1987 and 1997, suggesting high levels of stability and white (non-Hispanic) representation in areas of the country that are rapidly becoming more Latino, and more African American. Despite the fact that members of traditionally disadvantaged groups are making some modest progress in laying claim to a greater share of managerial positions in municipal governments, our analysis uncovers a clear pattern of inequalities and unequal progress. Latinas are by far the most underrepresented sex-ethnic group, and their position has remained stagnant throughout the period from 1987 through 1997. The lack of progress by Latinas is consistent with findings from studies on the private sector that indicate that relative to African American women, Latina employment

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prospects have worsened. These results underscore the need for more detailed information on the career paths and choices made by Latinas, African American women, and their coethnics working in public sector bureaucracies. The longer that equal access to public sector managerial positions is denied to members of traditionally disadvantaged groups, the more likely it is that citizen trust in bureaucracies of multi-ethnic cities will become an increasingly important political issue. In Making Democracy Work, Robert Putnam argues that social capital, defined as “ . . . features of social organizations, such as norms, trust, and networks,” makes concerted social action and change possible (Putnam 1993; also see Stivers 1993). In multiethnic cities that face a disproportionate share of poverty, crime, urban decay/deteriorating infrastructure, and underfunded public schools, novel solutions to old public policy problems are urgently needed. Public policy challenges such as these are much harder to address when urban bureaucracies lack legitimacy in the eyes of citizens they are supposed to serve, and when new leadership styles are not permitted to emerge because of the continuing underrepresentation of marginalized, traditionally disadvantaged groups.

Chapter 7

CONCLUSION: INTERACTION BETWEEN GLASS WALLS AND CEILINGS, FUTURE RESEARCH, AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we summarize our findings, identify relationships and patterns between walls and ceilings, provide suggestions for future research, and discuss some of the policy implications of our research. To begin, we observe that most discussions about women in so-called men’s occupations typically raise two questions. First, are there women who are qualified and who really desire these jobs? Second, are women suited or right for the jobs? If we assume that women both want and are qualified for such jobs, it is appropriate to conclude that the reason why women are not as well represented in such positions is that they continue to face impediments in public and private workplaces. A cursory glance back in history is helpful in thinking about answers to these questions. In the early 1940s, the United States was fighting against a well-armed and committed fascist alliance. That struggle was won as much by a vast workforce of working women in homeland industries as it was by their male counterparts fighting on foreign soil. Few considered women part of the available industrial labor pool until the Second World War demanded more workers than there were men available. Before the war, few women applied for such jobs because they knew, at some level, that society did not want them employed in jobs intended for men. Rosie needed her government to set visionary goals and to encourage her participation, especially in the most male-dominated positions. Targeted education programs were provided to help Rosie tool

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up for positions that society had previously restricted her from pursuing. For some Rosies, day care services were needed. As well as providing a vital industrial component to help win the war, the women’s war effort demonstrated that women were capable, interested, and willing workers in employment fields traditionally reserved for males. After the war, surveys indicated that many women wanted to keep their new place in industry (Gluck 1987). Eleanor Roosevelt, among others, argued that the women who wanted to stay in what were men’s positions should be allowed to do so. Yet government and industry leaders worked together to replace the large majority of the women with returning male soldiers. A government propaganda campaign informed women that it was now their patriotic duty to return to the kitchen. Industry handed out pink slips just because workers were female. Many women who needed the income to support families were excluded from high paying industrial jobs and went to work in lower paying clerical and service industry positions. Employment, hiring and advancement of particular groups of workers is not simply the result of the invisible hand of the market. The job opportunities of these groups are also affected by public policies. Over half a century has passed since the end of World War II. Despite several decades of legislation and court action designed to improve access of women to public sector careers, women are conspicuously underrepresented, and sometimes absent altogether, from traditionally male areas of the workforce. By contrast, women are overrepresented in clerical and human service positions. Women are better represented in the public sector than in the private sector, but both sectors still have a long way to go to achieve equity in the distribution of employment opportunities for women. We have presented an analysis that illustrates, at best, a gradual increase in female representation among some public sector managerial workforces from 1987 to 1997. Assuming such gradual rates of increase, some policy areas of government may not reach equal representation for women for at least another half a century—and in many cases it may take even longer to reach parity. The employment of minority women is at such a low level that equity seems an almost unattainable goal in certain types of agencies. If we, as a society, want more equitable and better representation, then proactive steps must be taken. The efforts of women during World War II proved that women are willing, interested, and capable. The employment of women and ethnic minorities in the public sector took on symbolic significance in the decades that followed World War II. Kingsley (1944) wrote that it was imperative to demonstrate the superiority of representative democracy over its totalitarian rivals. In effect, his

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indictment of the classist British civil service monolith was contrasted with a vision of a civil service that was representative of all groups. He specifically called for an inclusion of women into the public service. However, his recommendations never made it into the policy manuals and practices of state, local, or federal agencies. Kingsley, however, did not discuss the absence of racial minorities in the American public service. It took Krislov’s 1967 essay on “The Negro in Federal Employment: The Quest for Equal Opportunity” to point out that cultural, ethnic, and gender variety are important goals for bureaucracies in a democratic society. The renewed interest in representative bureaucracy in recent years further draws attention to an unfinished public policy agenda. To be sure, laws have been passed and administrative practices have changed over the last 50 years. Although outright discrimination is less visible, public organizations continue to be workplaces in which women and ethnic minorities encounter significant barriers. As our following discussion will show, these practices tend to impede their entry into certain agency positions, hinder their upward advancement, and/or steer women and ethnic minorities into specific departments. IMPEDIMENTS TO WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT REVISITED: A SUMMARY OF FINDINGS ON GLASS WALLS AND GLASS CEILINGS Bureaucracies are not passive implementers of legislative decisions. Bureaucracies shape public policies because legislative mandates require interpretation and implementation requires the use of discretion. How bureaucracies interpret their missions, communicate these missions through hiring and promotional practices, engage their constituents, and respond to the different needs of these constituents are tasks only they can define. In order for bureaucratic policy making to be considered a democratic process, all groups within our society should be represented. Our examination of public sector bureaucratic representation reveals a richly textured and complicated pattern of factors and interrelationships that vary widely across different functional policy areas and agency contexts. Overall generalizations, though necessary for theory development, should not be taken too seriously in any particular employment situation. In other words, the patterns of representation, and remedies to address the impediments to greater representation, are complicated by the existing sex and/or ethnic composition of an agency’s workforce, functional policy area/agency policy type, organizational culture, wage structure, ethnic composition of

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the citizenry, amount of discretion given to administrative personnel, level of government, and many other factors. In order to successfully redress the continuing underrepresentation of members of traditionally disadvantaged groups, policies must take into account the complexities that lead to continuing underrepresentation. Even using somewhat conservative measures, we find that municipal and state bureaucracies with distributive and regulatory policy commitments employ administrative workforces with continued high levels of sex-based segregation—and generally become only slightly more genderbalanced over time. Municipal governments appear to have made efforts to increase the number of women among professional workforces over the observed ten-year period, especially in natural resources/parks and recreation, police, community development, and corrections. In both state and municipal level highway and fire functions, however, a high level of occupational segregation among professionals continues. Gender balance is predominant among both administrative and professional workforces in municipal and state agencies with redistributive policy commitments. As with walls, our analysis of glass ceilings and sex-based salary disparities indicates that inequities are greatest in agencies included in the distributive and regulatory functions—and are much more likely at the administrative level than at the professional level. Less evidence exists for glass ceilings at the administrative level in redistributive agencies, but women in some municipal and state redistributive agencies continue to encounter difficulties in their attempt to break glass ceilings. We also find clear evidence of sex-based salary disparities at the professional level, primarily in agencies with distributive and regulatory policy commitments. COMPOUNDING IMPEDIMENTS: SEX AND ETHNICITY The focus of this book is on women in public bureaucracies. Our analysis indicates that the progress of women with minority ethnic backgrounds has been particularly problematic. Prospects for Latinas and African American women as well as for their coethnics do not look promising. Among these groups, we find continued, pervasive patterns of underrepresentation, and in some cases, stagnation. Representational disparities are the most pronounced among administrative workforces in agencies with regulatory and distributive policy commitments. Although each of these sex-ethnic groups is underrepresented, Latinas suffer from the lowest levels of representation among all groups. Generally, levels of representation

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(again, in proportion to their changing population numbers) for white males at the administrative level have not, on average, changed between 1987 and 1997, even in areas of the country that are rapidly becoming more Latino and African American—and less white. This latter finding is politically significant in thinking about underrepresentation among traditionally disadvantaged groups—and perhaps just as importantly, indicates that white men continue to be disproportionately overrepresented in many higher level administrative positions. EXAMINING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WALLS AND CEILINGS We suspect that glass ceilings and glass walls are linked, and in many instances, are reflections of similar types of impediments. Consequently, a focus on ceilings is useful in further understanding glass walls and vice versa. To be sure, the relationship between walls and ceilings may not remain constant across all types of agencies, suggesting that a complex set of relationships exists between these phenomena. For some types of agencies, namely those that are likely to place emphasis on recruitment at the bottom, low lateral entry, and internal promotion to top management positions rather than high lateral entry, glass walls must be shattered at the level of professional workforces before glass ceilings at the administrative level can be broken by larger numbers of women. On the other hand, some agencies are more likely to hire laterally into high-level administrative posts suggesting that, at least in some cases, the penetration of glass ceilings may constitute an important preliminary step in helping to weaken glass walls. Do different policy functions manifest different combinations of wall and ceiling strengths? Having examined walls and ceilings separately, we can address these questions, at least in terms of administrators/officials in state and municipal government by policy area, using the information in the tables we have already presented. Examining walls and ceilings simultaneously creates a more complete profile of patterns of descriptive representation in state and municipal agencies. We will also use this opportunity to do a comparative analysis between state and municipal agencies. As reported in table 7.1, we find that for the most part, the levels of wall and ceiling strengths are congruent (for example, if walls are hard then ceilings are also hard); however, there are notable exceptions. In cases where the agencies are classified differently in terms of wall and ceiling strengths (cities: corrections, health, finance/administration, parks, community development; states: corrections, utilities, parks, finance and

Table 7.1 Comparison of Walls and Ceilings at the State and Municipal Levels (Officials and Administrators, 1997)

Note: Wall - Hard 0.15, Medium 0.15 < 0.30, Soft 0.30 Ceiling - Hard 0.33, Medium >0.33 - 0.66, Soft 0.67

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administration, employment security, and housing), it is always the case that the ceilings are harder than the walls. In no case are women better represented in the upper management positions (in proportion to their numbers in the agencies) than in the overall agency administrative or professional workforce. This generalization suggests that the reduction in walls (better representation of women in the agency) is a precursor to a greater proportion of women in higher administrative positions (reduction in ceiling effects). The manner in which this relationship works, however, is less clear. There are at least three possibilities for describing relationships between the weakening of walls and weaker ceilings. First, in organizations that hire from within, as previously mentioned, the influx of qualified women within the agency results in more women available for promotion. Alternatively, the explanation may lie in the collective ability of women in the agency to act upon management to exert pressure for more women in higher administrative positions. This pressure may be overt in terms of comments, agitation, or the subtle mention of legal action. The pressure may also be less overt. The simple presence of more women may make an all-male upper administration appear less desirable. Finally, the prolonged presence of women in an agency may begin to subtly change the culture of the agency in such a way that the promotion or hiring of women in upper management is more acceptable to greater numbers of individuals, both women and men, working in the agency. Thus, the interaction of walls and ceilings can be quite complex. We think that it is likely that the weakening of walls reduces the effect of ceilings by producing a larger pool of women to promote, and introducing changes in the culture of the agency through the participation of women and growing pressure from women for a more representative agency. If effective public policy is to be developed, it is important to increase our understanding of the relationship between walls and ceilings and the mechanisms by which that relationship works. For example, when an agency has hard walls and hard ceilings, we need to know whether it is more effective to hire a few women in upper management, which will then contribute to an erosion of the walls, or alternatively, to concentrate on hiring more women into lower and middle level administrative or professional positions to promote the erosion of both walls and ceilings. Our findings suggest that the relationship between walls and ceilings may vary by the policy function of the agency, making the policy options complex and the interaction patterns of walls and ceilings contextual. As explained in the next section, the relationships between walls and ceilings may also depend on level of government.

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Differences between State and Municipal Agencies In what manner do state and municipal agencies differ in the degree of the permanence, rigidity or hardness of their walls and ceilings? For example, why is it that utilities, which we classify as a regulatory function at the state level, have softer walls than utilities at the local level, which we classify as distributive? In this particular case it may be that the professional groups from which the agency draws have a significant effect on the sex makeup of the agency. Unlike other state regulatory agencies (police, fire, and corrections), which have traditionally drawn from a blue-collar pool for their workforce and culture, utility agencies at the state level may draw more heavily from a white-collar pool that includes lawyers, accountants, and so on. The latter professional groups have seen significant increases in the number of women in their ranks. Utilities at the municipal level, which we call distributive, tend to be charged with running the power, water, and sewer plants rather than regulating them. These city agencies draw extensively from skilled trades (plumbers, electricians, technicians), which have been dominated heavily by males. There are also observable differences for community development. At the state level community development agencies are characterized by medium ceilings and medium walls, and thus, tend to be more representative than municipal level community development agencies, which have hard ceilings and medium walls. At the local level the focus in community development agencies is on urban renewal and historic preservation. By contrast, at the state level the focus is on economic development, the arts and/or tourism. The mission contains a strong distributive component at the state level whereas at the local level these agencies engage in some redistributive activities/programs. Redistributive agencies (health, welfare, and hospitals) all have soft walls and ceilings at the municipal level. The only difference at the state level occurs in the health function. It is likely that state health agencies, where ceilings are moderate rather than soft, have higher paying, more prestigious positions; it is likely that these positions tend to be fought over more fiercely than comparable positions at the municipal level. Housing at the state level, similar to Finance and Administration, has soft walls and moderate ceilings. Housing at the city level has moderate walls and ceilings and so is somewhat less representative than housing at the state level. Moderate rather than soft walls at the municipal level could be the result of a tradition of male dominance in positions the occupants of which are expected/required to work closely with contractors on permitting issues. Housing agencies at the state level are more occupied with

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finance, affordable housing, and administration of federal funds for lowincome housing needs than the city agencies. These duties tend to be more redistributive than those in city housing agencies. Larger cities may address these needs also, but many small and moderate-sized city housing agencies are more concerned with permitting, and thus, work with developers and builders. FUTURE RESEARCH Our research suggests that many questions in the area of ethnic and gender representation in public sector bureaucracies remain unanswered. For instance, from our analysis, we know that researchers who make salary comparisons between women and men for such purposes as comparable worth or equal pay studies must consider the effects of occupational segregation on a group’s salary level. Consequently, comparisons that do not disaggregate by agency (or at least by policy area) and level of government may reach erroneous conclusions about the source of job and salary disparities and therefore may miss the discriminatory mechanisms that produce inequities. Our findings suggest that if women are segregated in lower paying redistributive agencies, they are also effectively restricted in improving their salary level as a group because redistributive agencies pay less than agencies in other policy areas. Said differently, if a study finds that women make 80 percent of what men make in comparable positions, the finding should be interpreted differently in distributive agencies than in redistributive agencies. Furthermore, independent of the sex-based salary ratio, the number of women versus men used to compute the ratio is also an important finding that should be reported by researchers. In sum, salary comparisons should consider within agency disparities, the effect of occupational segregation in the public sector across different types of agencies, and the numbers of women and men working in the agency. A number of other questions should be addressed in future research pertaining to the representativeness of public bureaucracies. How has representation changed after retreats from affirmative action policy by state and municipal governments during the 1980s and 1990s? The data for our analysis ends in 1997. To observe the full effect of the ideological, policy, and legal shifts associated with decreased state and municipal government commitments to affirmative action policies, it will be necessary to continue the analysis forward in time. Will women and ethnic minorities improve their levels of representation in the absence of affirmative action policies? Further, will there be differences in the employment progress of

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women and ethnic minorities by state, regional political culture, policy areas, or level of government? What will be the employment/representational consequences of devolving formerly federal policy responsibilities to state and local governments? Our longitudinal research provides new insights into the complex relationship between walls and ceilings. However, a great deal of work remains to be done before we can fully understand the interactions between agency missions and hiring patterns on the one hand and the presence or absence of walls and ceilings on the other. Does the permeability of walls precede the permeability of ceilings or vice versa, as agencies move toward greater representativeness? Or, are the relationships in some cases recursive? Stated another way, should policy makers concentrate on walls or ceilings in order to most effectively produce better representation among bureaucratic workforces? This is an important question in shaping policy designed to make agencies more representative, but with only ten years of data we are unable to address these questions in a satisfactory manner. Our research was predominantly quantitative, but qualitative research would be very helpful in investigating the attitudes and opinions of female and male public sector managers toward the prospects and place of women in government bureaucracy. Given our findings on the differences in impediments by policy area, it is important that future qualitative research consider the culture and practices of several different agency functions in the three policy areas we have discussed as well as types of changes that have been observed over time. What are the characteristics of equitably and inequitably represented agencies? Can a multivariate model be constructed to explain variation in the strength of glass walls and glass ceilings that will take into account multiple factors such as region, workforce size, political characteristics of the community, form of government, wage and budget structures, and other relevant government unit characteristics? A causal model incorporating these characteristics will help researchers understand how the complex public environment works to influence representation. Policy makers can then tailor policies to the work and policy environment of their particular situations. In the final section of our study we turn our attention to public policy making and the contemporary policy environment. POLICY IMPLICATIONS Our analysis of glass walls, glass ceilings, and sex-ethnic groups leaves us with considerable concern about the future of representative bureau-

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cracy at the municipal and state levels in the United States. As Kelly (1998) argues, “The attainment of an inclusive democratic polity that will be recognized as just and fair by a vast majority of its citizens will not occur without setting that as a goal and providing theories and strategies to make it happen.” It is our hope that this discussion can contribute to providing the theories and strategies that are needed. It is clear from our research that the policy goal of representative bureaucracy will not be achieved in the same way across all policy areas, agencies, or levels of government. For instance, as we indicated earlier, the struggle to provide better representation in utilities agencies is not the same struggle in health agencies. Because employment policy solutions must be tailored to address the specific impediments in each policy context we decided that we should not attempt to provide a list of policy recommendations to public managers (without first conducting a great deal of additional research). More importantly perhaps, the approach of simply offering policy recommendations directly to public managers would ignore many realities of the current policy environment, an environment that limits what individual managers can do to increase diversity at the professional and administrative levels within their agencies. As we report in our empirical analysis, some organizations have been successful in improving conditions for traditionally disadvantaged groups of employees. However, our findings suggest that it is rare that state or municipal units of government have engaged in persistent, systematic, and successful efforts over time and across all of their professional and administrative ranks. Given the political, cultural, and economic constraints under which public managers operate, it appears that both legislative and administrative unwillingness to take responsibility in this regard need to be addressed. The greatest challenge—one that must in the interest of democracy be addressed—is at the level of systemic and institutional agendas (Kingdon 1995). In a policy environment where a sizeable number of citizens and policy makers either believe or claim to believe that equal employment opportunity has, for the most part, been achieved—and that affirmative action policies are either unnecessary or discriminate against white males—many misconceptions must be overcome before policy agendas can be changed in such a way as to provide public managers adequate latitude to implement effective measures to increase agency diversity among managerial workforces. Perhaps the most fundamental step in changing the policy agenda in the area of public sector bureaucratic representation/employment is providing to interested parties, other stakeholders, and the public at-large information on the extent and character of underrepre-

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sentation of various groups in managerial/policy-making jobs. The public also needs to understand that underrepresentation in such jobs can lead in some policy areas to disenfranchisement of certain groups. We strongly suspect that underrepresentation in state and municipal bureaucracies is not considered by most citizens to be a policy problem, but in a democratic polity committed to the goal of equitable representation it clearly ought to be. The perception that bureaucratic underrepresentation is not a problem serves to limit the discretion of public managers who might otherwise feel stronger incentives/pressures to pursue more aggressively the policy goal of equitable representation. In order for greater numbers of citizens to view bureaucratic underrepresentation as a policy problem deserving of widespread government attention, the need for policies to address underrepresentation has to be reestablished. We have discussed the fact that previous studies tend to rely on data sets that are small, biased, and/or non-generalizable. The primary contribution of this book is that it rectifies this situation for state and municipal bureaucracies. Our study demonstrates the level and character of managerial underrepresentation so that we now know (1) how serious the problem is, and (2) in which types of agencies it is the worst. An important question remains. What should be done in order to get the issue of bureaucratic underrepresentation on state and municipal government policy agendas? As we have already suggested, the solution is more complex than simply finding the right organizational or human resource techniques to encourage workforce diversity. For those sympathetic to the problem of bureaucratic underrepresentation, determining the successful course of action will entail many challenges including, but not limited to, problem definition, confronting strategies of agenda denial, addressing the tension between efficiency and representation, and federalism. Although the content of these challenges is clearly overlapping, we will discuss each of these challenges in turn. The way a problem is defined can affect its rise or decline on governmental policy agendas—and problem definition determines to a significant extent the solutions that are devised by government and adopted by the relevant political institutions (Rochefort and Cobb 1994; Schattschneider 1960). The process of defining the problem of bureaucratic underrepresentation will be shaped by a number of factors including scientific information (the primary focus of this book), cultural values/ideology, interest group advocacy, and professional advice (Rochefort and Cobb 1994). Proponents and opponents of greater representation of traditionally disadvantaged groups will define the problem differently in an attempt to gain

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political or economic advantage. If proponents want support for new initiatives, they must be able to appeal to broad sectors of the public including citizens who are not members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. This might be accomplished by emphasizing themes such as the importance of democratic decision/policy making, the benefits of procedural equality, democratic legitimacy, and the dangers of excluding groups from decision-making processes. The persuasive power of opponents to new initiatives may be even more important in understanding the challenges to achieving representative bureaucracy (Cobb and Ross 1997). Opponents of representative bureaucracy and of increasing the numbers of traditionally disadvantaged groups in public sector managerial positions will continue to emphasize themes with considerable and widespread appeal to the dominant culture such as efficiency, reverse discrimination, and merit. Although many political scientists and policy makers will recognize that these themes possess considerable ambiguity, this may be beside the point. Despite their ambiguous nature, these themes are likely to resonate with those who are over-represented in public sector managerial positions— white males. The most significant rhetorical and practical challenge may lie in the fact that proponents of a more representative bureaucracy must presumably offer problem definitions (and policy solutions) that appeal to a large number of white males—and the appeal to white males needs to be, on balance, greater than the appeal of the arguments centered on the themes of efficiency, merit, and reverse discrimination. Clearly, this is an enormously difficult task. Closely related to the concept of problem definition is the study of agenda denial or strategies designed to prevent the consideration of issues (Cobb and Ross 1997). Cobb and Ross argue that the major reason that items are excluded from the political agenda is the active effort of those who perceive that their interests would be harmed by the issue initiator’s success. Thus, issues are frequently defined in ways that help to insure that they never receive serious consideration from the relevant governmental institutions. Some of the primary mechanisms through which agenda denial is achieved are the emphasis on cultural and symbolic themes that invoke threats and deep fears among some citizens (Cobb and Ross 1997). One suggestion that may be made by opponents to any new initiative is that accomplishing the goal of representative bureaucracy necessitates the hiring and promotion of women and ethnic minorities who are less qualified. Such a claim exploits at least two fears. First, that significant numbers of white males will lose their jobs, and second, that less qualified individuals will be placed in a number of administrative, policy-making positions

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in government bureaucracies. Furthermore, exploiting these fears is advantageous to opponents of representative bureaucracy because this tactic shifts the focus of the debate from representative bureaucracy, a concept with democratic origins, to employment and promotion issues. This shift de-emphasizes government’s responsibility to devise strategies to make sure that employment and promotion pools are sufficiently diverse to achieve equitable representation. The effect of the shift is to move the problem from the public to the private realm. These arguments seem to bring us to the opponents’ argument that a representative bureaucracy is bound to be inefficient. Efficiency, however, is a complex concept, in part, because public bureaucracies pursue multiple and even conflicting goals. Many policy analysts and political scientists argue that representation as a process must be inefficient because a primary feature of representation is the consideration of diverse interests, and this takes a great deal of time, effort, and expertise. But this argument is in tension with the customary notion of efficiency, a notion that has considerable emotive appeal to a large majority of U.S. citizens. More often than not the general public tends to favor a definition of efficiency that is restricted to less expansive and less expensive government, and certainly favors less expansive bureaucracy. Consequently, if opponents of a more representative bureaucracy can portray it as a more expensive and less efficient option, this will help to deny it a prominent place on the agenda. Under this hypothetical but likely scenario, the proponents of representative bureaucracy may be forced to exploit the ambiguities inherent in the concepts of efficiency and merit in such a way as to capture the attention of policy makers and the public—no easy task. Furthermore, the public needs to be better educated about the conflictual, and indeed, enormously messy nature of the process of representation. This also appears to present a daunting challenge. Research on other political institutions indicates in convincing fashion that the public possesses a distaste for watching democracy in action (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995; Hibbing and Smith 2001). We are not necessarily saying that interests on the right, conservatives and/or those favoring the existing allocation of benefits and privileges, have a monopoly on politically useful symbols, rhetoric, and metaphors, but it does appear clear that their arguments have been carrying the day in recent times (Lakoff 1995). Nothing demonstrates the tone of the current policy environment and public mood better than Proposition 209 passed in California in November of 1996. This controversial initiative was designed to abolish race and gender preferences in hiring, education and public contracting. Some conservative voices have also suggested that

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gathering statistics on employment using the traditional categories for minority groups is itself a vestige of a discriminatory ideology. Putting aside the question of the sincerity of such arguments, a policy eliminating mandates to collect such information would be a great political victory for those who do not favor new initiatives to further the better representation of women and minority ethnic groups. Without the kind of statistics collected by the EEOC, researchers would not be able to provide comprehensive analyses of the problems women and ethnic minorities presently face with lack of representation. The need for the federal government to collect and analyze such data is clearly evident. Federalism creates a policy backdrop that may necessitate even greater involvement from the national government if real progress is to be made. Without renewed and persistent pressure from the federal government, the many state and local governments, left to their own devices, are unlikely to address this policy problem. This is strongly suggested by the employment records compiled by multi-ethnic cities from 1987 through 1997 upon which we reported in chapter 6. Even in cities where there are large minority populations, representative bureaucracy remains an elusive policy goal. The federal level would seem the most likely policy locus for keeping these issues on the agenda and monitoring our progress toward better representation. On a more philosophical level, perhaps the emphasis has too strongly been placed on incorporating women and ethnic minorities into the cultures of agencies that reflect male and dominant values (Martin and Jurik 1996). If real bureaucratic representation is to be realized, then public agencies must not be satisfied with simply looking like the community. Agencies must believe and think more like the diverse communities in which they are situated. In many cases this may require the learning of new cultural values/strategies, a daunting task in any workplace setting due to the fact that this is potentially threatening to the dominant culture and to the existing allocation of benefits and privileges. Perhaps the policy areas where women are underrepresented have less adaptive cultures that require assimilation and do not promote organizational accommodation. In recent years scholars have begun turning their attention from how to get women and minorities to fit in and have focused on how to get organizational cultures to reflect a diverse culture and workforce. Organizations must change their culture, behavior and policies to actively represent women and ethnic minorities in order for the goals of representative bureaucracy to be met. For too long bureaucracies have hidden behind the mantle of impartiality, neutrality, and efficiency. We have argued through-

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out the book that representation includes, but is not limited to, a rough proportion of constituents being present in an agency. The challenge to achieve both descriptive and substantive representation is especially critical in a time when the face of American society is rapidly changing, and when more and different groups seek a voice to affect policy outcomes.

Appendix

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STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT INFORMATION (EEO-4) REPORT

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INDEX

Acker, J., 21, 22 Adams, Susan, 25 Administrative occupations, defined, 40 Affirmative action, x, 11, 18, 24; future research, 115; redistributive policy, 28 Aguinis, Hernan, 25 Ahren, D. W., 7 Alderfer, C. P., 10 Alexander, Jackie, 14 Alm, Leslie, 12 Amburgey, T. L, 6 American State Administration Project, 38 Andrew Jackson, 8 Arnold, Margaret L., 77 Avolio, B. J., 6 Baldi, Stephen, 29 Ballard, Steve, 3, 12 Baron, James N., 4, 21, 22, 24, 55, 68 Barriers to women’s representation: access discrimination, 29; agency policy missions, 24–25; bureaucratic ethos, 28; contest model, 23;

glass ceilings, 23–24; glass walls, 23; homosocial mentoring, 23; internal (personal), 4; institutionalized impediments, 25; for Latinas, Black women, white (NonHispanic), 29–32; organizational structure and culture, 5; social closure process, 22; sponsorship model, mentoring, 23; status composition perspective, 22; structural, 4; treatment discrimination; 29 Bass, B. M., 6 Bayes, Jane H., 12, 13, 25 Beck, Susan A., 5, 7, 11 Bedolla, Lisa Garcia, 30 Behn, R. D., 6 Berman, Evan M., 5 Bernstein, J., 2 Bielby, W. T., 4, 22 Black women, 35 Blais, Andre, 20 Blau, Francine D., 5 Blau, P. M., 6 Blum, Terry, 18 Bohte, John, 20 Bound, John, 34

146 Brass, D. J., 25 Brewer, J., 9, 19, 31 Broschak, J. P., 6 Browne, Irene, 10, 35 Browning. R., 30, 47 Brudney, Jeffrey F., 5, 12 Bullard, Angela M., 13, 15, 23, 24, 25, 38 Burbridge, Lynn, 2 Bureaucracy, policy making, 7 Bureaucratic accountability, 1 Bureaucratic representation: active and passive, 19; defined, 18 Bureau of Labor Statistics, 13, 14 Burgess, Jayne, 5 Burke, J. P., 1 Burkhardt, M. G., 25 Carroll, Franklin, W., 12 Carroll, S., 5, 7 Cassirer, N., 21 Catalyst, 2–3 Cayer, N. Joseph, 27, 31, 37, 38 Chaney, C. K., 11, 14 Chertos, C. H., 22 Cobb, Roger W., 118, 119 Cockburn, C., 22 Coethnics, defined, 31 Cohen, L. E., 4, 6 Comparable worth, 22 Conway, M. M., 7 Cook, Brian J., 9 Cook, Cynthia R., 24 Corcoran, Mary, 35 Cornwell, Christopher, 12, 23, 31 Corson, John J., 27 Crum, John, 12, 24 Daley, Dennis M., 12, 31, 79, 35 Davis-Blake, Alison, 15, 23, 24, 25, 68 Democratic values and representation, ix, 1, 7, 11, 116–17

INDEX Descriptive representation: defined, 18; as policy output, 19–20 Dicke, L. A., 1 Dion, Stephane, 20 Discrimination: access and treatment types, 29–30; distributive agencies, 26; minority women, 31; sexethnic, 31 Dodson, Debra L., 5, 7 Dometrius, Nelson C., 6, 13, 19, 31, 32, 37, 38 Dresser, Laura, 34 Duerst-Lahti, Georgia, 9, 10, 11, 21, 28 Dye, Thomas, 14, 15 Edwards, R., 21 Eisinger, Peter R., 14 Elling, Richard C., 9 Elliot, E., 31 Emmert, M., 12, 23, 24, 27 Engstrom, Richard, 47 Epstein, C. F., 3 Equality, block and segmented, 9, 15 Equal Opportunity Act of 1972, 105, 49 Eribes, R. N., 14, 31, 32, 38, 47, 105 Federalism, 121 Ferber, M. A., 5 Fields, Dail, 18 Firestone, Juanita, 7 Franklin, Grace A., 29 Frederickson, H. George, 9 Froman, Lewis, 43 Gallas, Nesta M., 9 Garza, Marion, ix Gaston, Kevin, 14 Gender balance, operational definition, 42 Gibelman, M., 3 Gilligan, Carol, 5, 11 Gittleman, Maury B., 2

INDEX Glass ceiling: all male workforces, 80–87; ceiling ratio measure, 45–47; defined, x, 23–24; Glass Ceiling Act of 1991, 3; Glass Ceiling Commission, 3, 8; hypothesis, 33; interaction with glass walls, 111–13; levels of hardness, 46; measurement of, 45–47; sticky floors, 79 Glass walls: hypotheses, 33; levels of hardness, 68–69; operational definition, 42–43 Gluck, Sherna Berger, 108 Goodman, Jodi, 18 Gottfried, Frances, 4 Greene, V., 9, 19, 31 Greenhaus, Jeffrey H., 21, 29, 30 Guy, Mary E., 5, 6, 14, 25, 28 Guyot, J. F., 12, 13 Haignere, L., 22 Hale, Mary M., 4, 5, 11 Hall, Grace, 31, 38 Hardy-Fanta, Carol, 30 Haveman, H. A., 6 Hayghe, H. J., 2 Hebert, Ted. F., 5 Heflin, Colleen M., 35 Henry, Charles P., 9, 30 Hero, Rodney, 30 Hibbing, John, 120 Hindera, John, 18, 19 Howell, David R., 2 Hunter, Teola P., 31 Hypotheses: glass ceilings, 33; glass walls, 33; sex-ethnic, 33–34 Index of dissimilarity, 50 Intergovernmental Personnel Act Agreement, 49 Jacobs, Jerry A., 5, 14, 22 Johnson, Mary Cathy, 11

147

Johnson v. Transportation Agency, Santa Clara County (1987), 8 Jurik, N. C., 57, 60, 121 Kalleberg, Arne L., 24, 42 Kanter, Rosabeth, 8, 22 Karnig, Albert, 11, 14, 30, 31, 32, 38, 47, 105 Kaufman, Herbert, 21, 28 Kellough, J. Edward, 12, 23, 24, 31 Kelly, P., 6 Kelly, Rita Mae, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11, 25, 38, 117 Kerr, Brinck, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 38, 57, 60, 68, 78, 99, 50 King, Mary C., 4, 18 Kingdon, John, 117 Kingsley, J. Donald, 108–9 Kleeman, 6 Korac-Kakabadse, Nada, 24 Koretz, G., 58 Kouzmin, Alexander, 24 Krislov, Samuel, 7, 109 Kulik, Carol T., 25 Lakoff, George, 120 Latinas and African American women, 35 Lawn-Day, Gayle, 3, 12 Leonard, Jonathan S., 24 Levitan, D. M., 7 Lewis, Gregory B., 12, 14, 15, 23, 24, 27, 37–38, 68, 49 Lovrich, Nicholas, 14, 27 Lowi, Theodore, 25–29, 43, 65, 66, 72 MacManus, Susan A., 5 Mandel, R., 5, 7 Mani, Bonnie G., 12, 24, 25 Marsden, P. V., 42 Marshall, D., 30, 47

148

INDEX

Martin, S. E., 57, 60, 121 Maume, David J., 22 Mazey, M. E., 31, 32, 37, 38 McBrier Debra Branch, 2, 29 McCabe, Barbara C., 37, 38, 68 McClain, Paula, 11, 30, 31, 47, 99, 105 McDonald, M., 47 Meier, Kenneth J., 9, 20, 31 Mendez, C., 27 Merrit, S., 6, 7 Mezey, Susan Gluck, 6 Miller, Will, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 38, 50, 57, 68, 78, 99 Mills, Alfred, 28 Mishel, L., 2 Mladenka, Kenneth, 27 Monocultural/unigender orientation, 10 Moore, P., 31, 32, 37, 38 Mosher, Frederick, 17–18 Myers, Samuel, Jr., 18 Naff, Katherine C., 8, 9, 10–12, 23, 24, 31 Newman, Meredith Ann, 13, 15, 21–28, 38, 43, 66, 68 Nice, David, 23, 24, 37, 38, 68, 49 Nigro, L., 9, 18 Niskanen, William A., 20 Occupational discrimination: access, 29; treatment, 29 Occupational segregation, defined, 23 Officials and Administrators, defined, 40 Organizational development, 6 Ott, S. J., 1 Parasuraman, Soroj, 21, 29, 30 Patton, David, 12 Paul, Shale, 27

Perry, Elisa L., 25 Peterson, 50 Pfeffer, Jeffrey, 4, 15, 23, 24, 68 Pitkin, Hanna, 9, 20, 21 Police and representation, 21, 60, 64, 67; municipal, all male workforces, 82; sex-ethnic, 101; state, all male workforces, 84–86 Policy implications: agenda denial, 119–20; agenda setting, 117–20; organizational culture, 121; problem definition, 118–20 Policy types or agency missions, 24–29; classifying agencies, 43–44; distributive policy, defined, 26; Lowi definitions, 26; Peterson’s classifications, 50; redistributive policy, defined, 28; regulatory policy, defined, 27 Politics-administration dichotomy, 7 Powell, Gary N., 2, 21 Press, Julie, 35 Professionals, defined, 40 Proposition 209, 120 Putnam, Robert, 106 Pynes, J. E., 3 Reid, Margaret, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 38, 50, 57, 60, 68, 78, 99 Renick, James, 14, 15 Representation: active, defined, 17–19; descriptive, 9; passive, defined, 17–19; substantive, 9; symbolic, 20 Representative bureaucracy, 7; democratic government, 8; and effeciency, 120; importance of (justifications for), 5–11; political culture, 10 Representativeness ratio, measurement, 47–48

INDEX Research questions, 4–5 Reskin, B. F., 2, 14, 21, 22, 35 Reyes, Belinda L., 35 Riccucci, Norma M., 14, 23, 27, 38, 64 Ripley, Randall B., 29 Rizzo, A., 27 Rochefort, David A., 118 Roos, P. A., 14, 21 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 108 Rosenbloom, David H., 11, 31 Rosie the Riveter, 107–9 Ross, Marc H., 119 Rourke, Francis, 7 Rubin, M., 14 Saidel, Judith R., 23, 38, 64 Salary disparities, 24; measurement, 45–46 Saltzstein, A., 38 Saltzstein, Grace Hall, 9, 11, 14, 31 Schattschneider, Elmer E., 118 Schott, R. L., 25 Schwartz, J. E., 6 Segmented labor markets, 21 Selden, Sally Coleman, 7, 9, 12, 18, 19, 31 Senior Executive Service, 12–13 Sex-ethnic representation: administrative occupations, 96–101; competition, 11; measurement of, 47; professional occupations, 101–4; representation over time, 110–11; research objectives, 95; and white male workers, 99–100 Shapiro, Virginia, 6–7 Shinew, Kimberly J., 77 Sigelman, Lee, 6, 10, 13, 19, 27, 31, 32, 37, 38 Slack, James, D., 14 Smith, James, 120 South, S. J., 6 Sprigs, William E., 18

149

Stanwick, Kathy A., 6 Steel, Brent, 14, 27 Steiger, T. L., 2 Stein, Lana, 38 Steinberg, R. J., 22 Steuernagel, G. A., 7 Stewart, D., 6 Stewart, J., 31 Stivers, Camilla, 6, 11, 12, 106 Stream, Christopher, 37, 38, 68 Supply-and-Demand Arguments, 8; and human capital, 21 Supreme Court, 11 Tabb, D., 30, 47 Tancred, P., 28 Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth, 120 Thomas, C. A., 10 Thomas, Sue, 7, 12 Thompson, Frank J., 18 Tigges, Leann, 35 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 105, 49 Tolleson-Rinehart, Susan, 5, 7, 11 Tomaskovic-Devey, D., 22, 24, 42 Turner, R. H., 23 U.S. Census Bureau, 37 U.S. Department of Labor, 21, 35 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 26–28, 40, 91 U.S. General Accounting Office, 12–13 Vega, Arturo, 7 Velliquette, Beth, ix Verstegen, Dayna, 21 Walker, Sam, 27 Wardell, M., 2 Warner, Rebecca, 14, 27 Welch, Susan, 6, 7, 10, 14, 31, 32, 38, 47, 105

150 Wildavsky, Aaron, 28 Women’s employment progress, 12–14; federal, 12–13; state, 13; municipal, 14 Women’s labor force participation, managerial ranks, 2–4, 6

INDEX Workforce, impact of women on, 6 Wormley, Wayne M., 21, 29, 30 Wright, Deil S., 5, 13, 15, 23, 24, 25, 38 Young, Cheryl, 18, 19

About the Authors MARGARET F. REID is associate professor and graduate coordinator and MPA director in the Department of Political Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her work has appeared in Public Administration Review, Women & Politics, Urban Affairs Review, State and Local Government Review, and in numerous edited works. BRINCK KERR is associate professor of political science and coordinator of the Center for the Study of Representation at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is editor of American Review of Politics and his research has been published in various academic journals. WILL MILLER is associate professor of political science and director of the Public Policy Ph.D. Program, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. His work has appeared in Public Administration Review, American Review of Public Administration, Women & Politics, State and Local Government Review, American Journal of Political Science, and elsewhere.

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Glass Walls and Glass Ceilings: Women's Representation in State and Municipal Bureaucracies

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