Femocratic Administration: Gender, Governance, and Democracy in Ontario

Tammy Findlay Femocratic Administration: Gender, Governance, and Democracy in Ontario Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2015Reviewed by Howard A. DoughtyBefore anyone leaps to the wrong conclusion, Tammy Findlay's new book about women in public sector administration does not purport to describe a bureaucracy in which women are dominant as aristocratic implies control by a select few or democratic by the majority or, less kindly, by the mob. Her term is not original and its history is slightly controversial, but she uses it as something of a conflation of and democratic.The presumption upon which her work is based is that there is a pressing need for the state to address unequal relations of power [that are] evident all around us. These inequalities are based on divisions according to class, race and gender. They are empirically verified by even the most cursory examination of pertinent data and can be denied only by those who prefer ideology to evidence-based argument.For Findlay, feminism isn't only about the systemic discrimination against women. It also offers singularly useful methods to probe other dimensions of inequality and inequity. She speaks, for example, of a political economy that conjoins fruitful analyses of social relations and practical strategies to democratize society. Of course, her main focus in this book is on the public sector. Public administration, she says, remained largely unaffec ted by feminist analysis. It is a problem she intends to address.One of the most important feminist interventions ... has been to expand our definition of the 'political' beyond the institutions of the state to include other political terrain, including non-governmental organizations and social movements, and those relations previously considered to be private, such as the family. - Tammy FindlayTo accomplish her task, Dr. Findlay concentrates on a particular organization, the Ontario Women's Directorate (OWD) as it functioned during a specific time period, 1985-2000. Her themes include questions of power and gender; but, she is under no illusion that, despite its somewhat aspirational title, the OWD succeeded in transforming the Ontario public service or even in establishing a distinctively and permanently successful experiment in feminist innovation. Before discussing the substance of her work, however, I want to make a preliminary methodological point and an introductory theoretical point.Findlay has produced what is commonly known as a case study. Like biographies of important historical figures, case studies are normally about singularities rather than deeper structural patterns and contextual dynamics. Biographies focus on the qualities of their subjects. They are meant to inspire admiration (or, sometimes, loathing). They intend to teach lessons about how great achievements (or, sometimes, great failures) result from the attitudes and actions of extraordinary people. Gibbon's magisterial work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and endless narratives about the lives of villains from Adolph Hitler serial killers notwithstanding, the bulk of such studies are mainly meant to tell us what to do in order to take advantage of circumstances and to impose our various wills in pursuit of our personal ambitions or, in somewhat less frequent instances, to contribute to the benefit of the organizations in which we function or the well-being of the society which we inhabit.While being a case study, Findlay's book does considerably more than can usually be found in such work. She has conducted a large number of interviews and examined an extensive array of pertinent documents, from which she has built a compelling narrative. Her book is replete with revealing anecdotes and insights into the personal prejudices, political positions and policy proposals put forward by political leaders, senior public servants and advocates from civil (and occasionally uncivil) society. …

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