When I was president of the American Society for Public Administration, I grappled with questions of where that field was going, how it could make it… - Mary E. Guy

Is there symmetry between women and men in public management in terms of opportunity, power, and numbers? Mary Guy examines two decades of affirmative action initiatives. She finds the number of women in decision-making positions disproportionately low when compared to their numbers in the public work force. Women's integration into the fabric of American governance has been marked by surges of progress followed by periods of quiescence. Her article compares the status of women to that of men in career public management positions and argues that women have a long way to go before they will reach parity.

The man instrumental in the creation of the Brookings Institution, Charles E. Merriam, sought to move toward a “science of politics.” In his presidential address to APSA in 1921, he spoke of what he called a pressing problem, the reconstruction of the methods of political study (Merriam 1921, 174). Thus began a trend that placed increasing emphasis on the development of theories and testable hypotheses.

As a subfield, public administration first appeared separately in the annual listing of doctoral dissertations in the American Political Science Review in 1936.