The theory of representative bureaucracy has received much sustained attention over the past forty plus years, resulting in a wealth of scholarship that investigates the representativeness of public bureaucracies, the kinds of outputs they produce, and the link between these two things. We know that women are more likely to be found in low-level positions, that they are disproportionately located in certain agency types, and that factors such as political culture, region, private sector employment levels, and female political representation often affect their levels of passive representation in government bureaucracies (i.e. Bowling, Kelleher, Jones and Wright 2006; Selden 1997; Sigelman 1976; Saltzstein 1983, 1986). However, we know surprisingly less about the ways in which women behave in public bureaucracies, how they potentially socialize their colleagues to be gender sensitive, how they perceive and advocate for their clientele and constituents, and how they produce outputs that are either gender responsive or gender neutral. This paper attempts to fill this gap by fleshing out the role of gender consciousness, explaining how this concept promises a much richer understanding of the role gender plays in American public bureaucracies, and offering suggestions for empirically examining the various steps of the representative bureaucracy puzzle. I argue here that the study of gender and representative bureaucracy is extraordinarily complex and in need of more nuanced methodological approaches. I contend that part of the explanation here is that scholars have underestimated and misconstrued the role gender plays in creating policy outputs that benefit female clientele and constituents. Drawing heavily from the work of Sally Coleman Selden (1997) and her concept of the minority representative role, I encourage scholars to develop a similar measure to assess gender consciousness among male and female administrators. Because gender consciousness holds promise as an explanatory variable for understanding the linkage between descriptive and substantive representation, and because we know so very little about the mechanisms that connect attitudes to behavior, it is especially important to consider this linkage when investigating administrative behavior. Doing so will shed light on important questions in the representative bureaucracy literature
