Essays on women's representation and its bureaucratic outcomes

Women’s representation has long been a focal point in political science and public administration. While building on the well-established literature on political and bureaucratic representation, much existing research on women’s representation treats gender as one of many identity categories, rather than examining women’s representation as a distinct area of inquiry. As a result, although women’s representation is often shown to significantly affect public organizations and policies, the mechanisms are only sporadically examined. This dissertation integrates the representation literature with perspectives from gender equity and other subfields of public administration, such as public personnel and local government, to unpack the mechanisms by which women’s representation influences public organizations and policies. In this framework, organizational outcomes include internal management practices and external responsiveness to citizens, while policy outcomes encompass government policymaking and public attitudes toward policies. The dissertation further identifies leadership, emotional labor, discretion, and representative claims as key mechanisms that explain how women’s representation shapes these bureaucratic outcomes. Drawing on surveys, administrative data, focus group interviews, survey experiments, and machine learning techniques, this dissertation employs four individual essays to examine how women’s representation shapes bureaucratic outcomes. The first essay examines women’s representation and female employees’ sexual harassment experiences in government and highlights the role of leadership. Using data from the 2021 Merit Principles Survey and FedScope, a multilevel zero-inflated negative binomial model shows that as the proportion of women supervisors increases, the likelihood of female employees experiencing sexual harassment significantly decreases. The second essay examines gendered differences in government responsiveness and the role of emotional labor. Using machine learning and survival analysis on over 24,500 citizen online requests, the study finds that compared to their male counterparts, women bureaucrats are more responsive as the emotional demands of citizens’ service requests increase. Focus group interviews further contextualize the practical implications. The third essay examines the impact of women’s representation on government policymaking and highlights the role of fiscal federalism. Drawing on an original dataset of county governments in New York (2010–2019), the two-way fixed effects model shows that greater women’s representation is associated with increased budget allocations to women-friendly policy areas, especially where policymakers have greater discretion. The fourth essay uses an information experiment to examine the symbolic effects of representative claims on people’s attitudes toward equity policies in government. Findings show that representative claims that adjust women’s overestimation increase their support for gender-based affirmative action in government, while claims that adjust men’s underestimation significantly increase opposition to this equity policy. This dissertation makes several contributions. First, it advances the scholarship on women’s representation as a distinct area of inquiry by offering a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework for future research. Second, it contributes to the broader representation literature by examining multiple dimensions of women’s representation: political, bureaucratic, internal, external, and representation as a construct. Third, it highlights the implications of women’s representation for gender equity in public organizations and policies, unpacking the mechanisms through which these effects occur. Fourth, it offers valuable insights for other subfields of public administration, including public personnel management, digital government, local government studies, and behavioral public administration, and provides a unique gendered perspective that informs both theory and practice across these fields.