Paper short abstract:

Can an ethical ideal of bureaucratic objectivity promote an alternative, feminist, bureaucratic practice that would challenge the patriarchal gendered hegemony governing most bureaucracies? Tracing the moral experience of an all-women team of Israeli government bureaucrats suggests that maybe so.

Paper long abstract:

Can an ethical ideal of bureaucratic objectivity promote an alternative, feminist, bureaucratic practice that would challenge the patriarchal gendered hegemony governing most bureaucracies? Drawing upon fieldwork with the bureaucratic team of the Israeli Sal Committee suggests that maybe so. The Sal Committee is a government-appointed committee that convenes annually to determine subsidies on new medical treatments as part of Israel's public healthcare program. Aware of the life-and-death implications of committee decisions, the committee's bureaucratic all-women team who prepare the data upon which the committee makes its decisions, attempt to "work objectively" to promote the ethical goal of fair resource allocation. To them, working objectively means ensuring that the documents they write do not convey their personal views. This conception intersected with their gendered predisposition towards minimizing their presence at the committee, which presumably emanated from the patriarchal gendered hegemony governing their workplace. Together, these two orientations directed staff members to "work objectively" by engaging practices aimed at minimizing their presence in Sal Committee's discussions.

Drawing upon phenomenologist Iris Young's "Throwing Like a Girl" (1979), I thus argue that Sal Committee staff members "bureaucratize like girls." Bureaucratizing like a girl can bring about a reaffirmation of a patriarchal division of labor. Nonetheless, it also brought the staff to constitute a model of bureaucratic work that resembles the alternative, feminist model of bureaucracy offered by feminist scholar Kathy Ferguson (1984). Examining bureaucratic practice through the prism of moral experience thus illuminates the potentiality for a feminist "otherwise" in bureaucratic systems.