Editorial
| Author | Karen Johnston Miller,Duncan McTavish |
| Published date | 01 April 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076709102506 |
| Date | 01 April 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Editorial
Special Issue: Gender and Equality in Public Life
Karen Johnston Miller
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Duncan McTavish
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
This special issue on gender and equality in public life addresses an area that is
under-researched and under-published in most mainstream peer reviewed journals
in the fields of public policy and public administration. The contributions in this
issue of Public Policy and Administration are international in scope, including
articles focused on electoral systems and their impact on representational
diversity; community councils; the bureaucracy of the European Commission
(EC); policy, gender mainstreaming and the evaluation of skills; a practitioner
piece from a leading policy maker in the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human
Rights Commission (EHRC).
The broad issue of gender and equality in public life is of course of current inter-
est. In the UK, women are under-represented as Members of Parliament (though
somewhat less so in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly), in the Cabinet,
the House of Lords, as local authority leaders, local authority chief executives, the
senior civil service, education management, the health service, and publicly
appointed bodies (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2008). The UK
Parliament is establishing a Speaker’s Conference that will consider and make
recommendations on how to improve the representation of women, disabled
persons and ethnic minorities in the House of Commons. Gender in public life is
also of international topicality. In the US Presidential and primary campaigns the
existence of female candidates has foregrounded the issue of gender in political
representation.
In this issue of Public Policy and Administration, Sabina Siebert shows that the
high representation of women in voluntary and community groups (well observed
in a wide range of research and literature) is not often replicated at broader
legislative level. Her study is based on the movement of women from community
DOI: 10.1177/0952076709102506 115
© The Author(s), 2009.
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