Women Leaders in Public Administration Through Representative Bureaucracy Theory: An Integrative Review

Abstract

The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in public administration remains a global challenge, despite normative, legal and institutional advances. This article analyses how the presence of women leaders in the public sector has been addressed through representative bureaucracy theory. An integrative literature review was conducted following the PRISMA 2020 protocol, with searches conducted in Scopus and Web of Science databases. After identification, screening and eligibility stages, 20 articles published between 2000 and 2025 were included. The corpus was examined through thematic analysis and organised into five themes: forms of women’s representation in bureaucracy; access, merit and organisational barriers to women’s leadership; effects associated with women’s presence in public leadership; intersectionality and diversity of experiences; and symbolic representation, public perception and institutional legitimacy. The findings show that passive representation is treated as a necessary but insufficient condition for active representation. The corpus also indicates a recent intensification of publications, a predominance of quantitative studies and a stronger focus on operational levels than on senior management. The conversion of women’s numerical presence into substantive influence depends on discretion, role congruence, critical mass, institutional legitimacy and support networks, and is constrained by masculinised organisational cultures, informal patronage networks, ambiguous merit criteria and clientelist or politically dependent contexts. The review also shows that women’s leadership is associated with relevant organisational and institutional effects, including more collaborative and inclusion-oriented management styles, greater attention to social policies, support for women-sensitive agendas, mitigation of gender pay disparities and more positive perceptions of organisational climate. Nevertheless, these effects are not automatic: they are moderated by hierarchical position, formal authority, internal legitimacy, organisational socialisation and the presence of allies. Intersectional findings indicate that women’s trajectories are shaped by race, ethnicity, class, age, religion, motherhood and work–family responsibilities, producing cumulative disadvantages such as double glass ceilings, tokenism, isolation and invisible emotional labour. Symbolically, women leaders may strengthen public trust, institutional legitimacy and the perception that the state is plural and accessible; however, symbolic representation can also be weakened by tokenism, accusations of favouritism, resistance to quotas and the perception that diversity policies are externally imposed. The review identifies persistent gaps, especially the predominance of Global North settings, quantitative and cross-sectional designs, operational-level analyses and limited evidence on senior women leaders in the Global South, where recruitment, discretion and legitimacy may follow distinct institutional patterns. These findings reinforce the need to examine not only the number of women in public leadership, but also the institutional conditions that allow their presence to become substantive, legitimate and transformative.