Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Research and Policy Brief

Volume

63

Publisher

Utah Women & Leadership Project

Publication Date

12-5-2024

First Page

1

Last Page

8

Abstract

Research shows that communities and organizations increasingly thrive when men and women work together in leadership roles.1 Gender inclusivity benefits not only businesses, churches, schools, and state legislatures, but also state and local governments. American democracy is grounded in the idea of representation.2 “Representative bureaucracy” is the term for government entities employing a workforce that shares the demographic characteristics of the communities they serve,3 and the combined experiences and perspectives of that workforce represent and benefit all residents within its purview.4 This includes the thousands of government professionals who run the daily functions of municipalities in the State of Utah.

Gallup reports that 67.0% of Americans have a “great deal or a fair amount of trust in their local government,”5 and while this shows a slight decline over recent years, it is far less than the steep decline in trust of federal government. Fortunately, many decisions that have the greatest impact on the everyday lives of Utah residents do not happen in Washington DC or even in Utah’s State Capitol. They occur in the chambers of city councils and town meeting halls, where community members have much more access to their local elected government leaders than to those at the state and national levels. Yet, for local governments to run efficiently, the oversight of day-to-day operations is most often delegated to administrative professionals.

Since 2010, Utah Women & Leadership Project (UWLP) researchers have published data on the representation of women in many different settings (e.g., business, politics, nonprofit, schools and colleges, and boards and commissions). In 2020, UWLP conducted research to determine how reflective the leadership of Utah’s government organizations are of the communities they serve. The goal was to document a baseline of the number and percentage of women in leadership that can be used in the future to learn where progress has been made. This brief is the third of a series intended to provide an update to the 2020 research; it quantifies women leaders who work in Utah’s municipal public sector in 2024. Previous updates in this series documented women in leadership positions in the State of Utah government and in Utah’s 29 counties.

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