Women in the Public Administration Literature: Past, Present and Future

The present study aims to understand if and how the public sector literature has analyzed the gender issue, focusing on the role of women during an uncertain period (Jia et al., 2020). From this analysis, it will be possible to i) define the state of the art of the public sector accounting, audit and management literature considering the gender diversity; ii) identify the literature gap in this area; iii) think about the further lines of research. The authors adopted a bibliometric analysis, a quantitative approach to analyze previous research papers, combined with a qualitative literature review. This mixed-method allows obtaining a more reliable and objective analysis due to the quantitative investigation and an in-depth and critical analysis thanks to the qualitative method (Massaro et al., 2016; Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017; Xu et al., 2018; Paoloni et al., 2020a; Paoloni et al., 2020b). The database has been extracted from the ISI Web of Science (WoS), and the eligible sample includes 101 documents. First Findings: The analysis shows that this is a trending topic, and the attention of scholars is still growing. The major number of publications analyzed the agency level of governments located in the US; therefore, other potential organizational contexts and countries could be considered. Most documents implement quantitative methods, which are preferred to any other typology. More studies could focus their attention on qualitative in-depth research approaches. Finally, from the co-citation analysis, the topics on representative bureaucracy and the impact of women on public performance turn out to be widely examined in the sample. Conversely, no one analyzed the role of women during a crisis or a significant change in the public sector. Although public sector literature is an area already much explored by scholars, not so many contributions are focused on the gender issue, on the contrary of what happens in the private one (e.g. Paoloni and Demartini, 2016). Therefore, this work could be considered original for the topic addressed and the methodology implemented. The main contribution consists of the emphasis given to gender topics in public sector studies. Furthermore, it also could bring out the gap between gender research and practice. In particular, it highlights how literature analyzed most common discriminatory phenomena, such as glass ceiling and glass cliff, and how it suggested to prevent them in the public sector.