Lauren Dula is an assistant professor of public administration and a Ph.D. in public affairs graduate of the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on gender, equity, and diversity both in the nonprofit and public sectors. She combines traditional public administration themes such as representative bureaucracy, and organizational and governance theories with social theories from psychology and sociology in the study of nonprofits and the public sector. Dula publishes in top nonprofit and public administration journals including Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and Public Administration Review. Key research in nonprofit governance focuses on the gender composition of United Way boards of directors and its relationship to giving decisions. She also investigates community characteristics that are related to finding more women represented on nonprofit boards, as women are often still in the minority in these leadership roles. Her work also spans into the public sector. She co-authored pieces using focus group data of local elected officials in North Carolina. The first, “What she said, what he said: local elected officials' views of effective leadership behaviors,” looks at what local elected officials found to be effective leadership practices through a gendered lens. Stereotypical aspects of women’s leadership styles were noted to be most effective by both men and women. The second paper from this project asked what these officials found to derail elected officials’ careers and worked to provide a public sector definition of derailment. Dula is currently working on two separate projects, one focused in the nonprofit sector and the other in the public sector, with an emphasis on gender as well as race. The first set of papers will be investigating state and federal bureaucracies and the experiences of women of color with respect to their levels of discretion, perceptions of discrimination, and perceptions of ethics. The second project uses an experimental survey to evaluate value messaging amongst readers of fundraising acquisition letters using a gendered lens. She and her co-author received the first Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation’s Wilson C. “Bill” Levis Research Grant to fund that project.
Lauren Dula
Assistant Professor
CCPA Public Administration and Policy
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