Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 514–516doi:10.1111/1467-8500.12102DEBATEφ ́ασμαPhasma1Mark Evans and Meredith EdwardsInstitute for Governance and Policy Analysis, University of CanberraI do not resent criticism, even when, for the sakeof emphasis, it parts for the time with reality(Winston Churchill, Speech, House of Com-mons, 22 January 1941 reported in Hansard).This is an extremely interesting reviewwhich makes several important insightsinto the academic literature on women andleadership. It develops a five pronged critiqueand in the process maps out the constituentelements of a potentially important futurecontribution to academic debate. Dr Colleytakes issue with: the absence of theoreticalframing of the research; our limited reflectionon the existing Australian and internationalacademic literature and over-reliance on thegrey literature; she challenges the method-ological rigour of our empirical work on thebasis of the typology used for categorising thesample of departments engaged in the research(despite recognizing that the ‘strength of thepaper is the breadth of the primary data’);and, argues that the prescriptive section of thearticle wasn’t drawn with sufficient detail orradicalism. Dr Colley then provides advice onhow we should have gone about conductingthe research. While we urge Dr Colley to writethis article, it is not the one that we set out towrite in this journal. Let us deal with each ofthe core criticisms in turn under the headingstheorisation, typology and prescription.