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SALT LAKE CITY — While the overall results were better than she expected, Susan Madsen believes Utah can still do better when it comes to having women in leadership roles at the county level.
“But it’s exciting because good things can happen when we try,” she said.
Madsen is the founder and director of the Utah Women and Leadership Project, which released the second of its three studies analyzing the number of women in leadership roles in the Utah government on Wednesday.
Like an earlier study on state leaders, the research team again found a disparity in the number of women in these roles compared to men.
The study accounted for 1,946 leadership positions across all 29 Utah counties and found that 42.5% of them are occupied by women.
The group released its study on Utah’s state government on Aug. 4, which showed that 39.3% of state-level government leadership positions are currently held by women. While the 42.5% county figure is better than that of the previous study, Madsen said Utahns can’t get complacent about improving.
“There is danger, absolutely, in people around the state saying, ‘We’re doing fine,’” she said.
There was no comparable national or state data available for the rest of the country, according to Madsen, so the only comparison Utahns can make is how far the state has come — and has yet to go. The Utah Women and Leadership Project plans to do another series of these studies in a few years to track progress.
Shireen Ghorbani, an at-large member of the Salt Lake County Council, said she is glad these studies are being done in the Beehive State.
“If we don’t have the data to understand what’s happening outside of our immediate bubble, we are not making well-informed, data-driven decisions,” she said.
Similar to the last paper, the group broke down the data further and analyzed it in seven different ways.
7 analyses of the data
- By county: Jobs were broken down to see how the 29 Utah counties compare to one another. Emery County had the highest percentage of women in its leadership body at 73.6%. Additionally, Garfield, Daggett, Carbon and Rich counties were all at or above 50%.
Also worthy of mention is Salt Lake County, which accounted for 737 jobs — the most in the study. Of those positions, 49.4% were held by women. With Salt Lake County’s leadership positions making up more than one-third of the data set, the 42.5% overall figure is skewed toward that percentage.
“Salt Lake really helped our numbers be as high as they are,” Madsen said.
It also means that other counties are far below the state’s average.
Utah, Piute and Juab counties were all below 20% in terms of women in leadership roles, and that lack of diversity is significant for their citizens, according to Madsen.
She stressed the benefits of having an equitable leadership body, saying complex issues are best resolved when women make up at least 30% of the leadership body, with 40-50% being ideal.
“There’s just so many benefits to really serving the residents of Utah, serving the counties and communities that we have in better ways when you really have a variety of voices at the table,” she said. “Those counties that are lower, I would argue, really don’t have those benefits.”
- Leadership level: Jobs were classified into four categories: front-line, senior, executive and elected official. As Madsen expected, the lower the level of leadership, the higher the percentage of women, generally.
Women occupied 49.8% of front-line jobs and only 29.2% of elected positions. They also held 36.9% of senior positions and 38.8% of executive roles.
She’s hoping that as society sees an increasing number of women becoming leaders it inspires a cultural shift. She pointed to Salt Lake County as an example.
“Generally speaking, who’s in charge of the county really sets the culture,” she said. “There’s just been a string maybe through the last decade that there’s been some women that have had leadership roles in that county; that really impacts everything in decades that follow.”
- Multi-county districts: The study also grouped geographically into seven multi-county districts. The Wasatch Front multi-county district (Davis, Morgan, Salt Lake, Tooele and Weber counties) accounted for the most jobs, of which women held 46.7%. The southeastern multi-county district (Carbon, Emery, Grand and San Juan counties) had the highest percentage of women in leadership positions at 52.2%.
The Bear River multi-county district (Box Elder, Cache and Rich counties) had the lowest percentage, 27.6%.
Additionally, the Mountainland multi-county district (Summit, Utah and Wasatch counties) had women in 35.2% of its leadership jobs.
- County class: Jobs were broken down based on how large their counties are in terms of population. The first class, which had the largest population size (700,000 people or more), only included Salt Lake County and had the highest percentage of women in leadership roles at 49.4%.
The fifth class (4,000-11,000 people) had the second highest percentage of women in leadership positions at 49.2%.
Madsen said she expected the percentages to follow a more linear trajectory, with the percentages falling as the population did. The results in the lower-populated areas surprised her, especially.
The larger, more urban counties have become increasingly aware of the need for diversity in the past decade, she said, which explains why Salt Lake County has such a balanced proportion of men and women in leadership roles.
“We’ve got a lot of really highly skilled, incredibly dedicated public servants who are women, who are at the top of leadership at county governments in Salt Lake County,” Ghorbani said.
- Typology: Jobs were classified as administrative, distributive, redistributive and regulatory. Similar to the last study, women held the highest percentage of jobs in redistributive fields at 61.2%.
Redistributive fields include health care and education.
“No surprises. Redistributive just makes sense,” Madsen said. “We do tend to go toward those types of feminine agencies.”
The lowest proportion of women leaders was in distributive fields at 13.2%, which include transportation and energy agencies.
- Number of county employees: Women had the highest proportion of jobs in the counties with the highest number of employees (1,300-7,300) at 49.4%.
This did not fit with national trends. According to the paper, “national research suggests women are more likely to be leaders over smaller organizations, have fewer people to supervise, and have less financial responsibility.”
The distribution of women formed a curve in the data, with lower percentages of women seen in groups with middling numbers of county employees and higher percentages seen in counties with lots of employees and very few employees.
“A curve is exactly what we’re seeing,” Madsen said. “We’re really not sure why.”
- Position classification: Jobs were broken down into four categories: part-time/time-limited, merit, appointed and elected. Having a 75% distribution, women were best represented in part-time/time-limited jobs, though only 20 positions were marked as such, and were least represented as elected officials at 28%.
10 recommendations for improvement
Ghorbani believes that understanding the need for reform is the first step toward larger change, especially in a state that has continually struggled with gender equality.
“I think we have to move into a space where we agree that there’s a problem,” she said. “It’s not particularly helpful for us to rehash the past decisions or previously held beliefs that may have gotten us into this place.”
According to her, changing culture often comes at an individual level, and every government official needs to be more accountable for their actions.
“It’s something that I think about, and I’m consciously looking for ways that we can defy some of the statistics that we know characterize women’s work lives in Utah,” she said.
Madsen hopes such attitudes spread to other counties in Utah that are struggling with gender equality issues. Small changes now can have an impact that last decades, she said.
The paper lists 10 additional tips for improvement of gender diversity:
- Begin establishing a “tone from the top” that is firmly committed to supporting and advancing women, with an eye to advancing women of color.
- Make a visible commitment, such as the ElevateHERChallenge and/or the Parity Pledge, and publicize this decision.
- Provide training to staff that offers strategies and tools to support gender equity in the workplace (e.g., hiring, performance evaluations, promotions, and committee participation).
- Explore gender representation at all levels of leadership by collecting and sharing the data, both inside and outside of the organization.
- Ensure diverse hiring interview panels to reduce potential bias in the hiring process, with a goal of 50% women and 50% men.
- Pay attention to who is mentioned during discussions of projects. Take the opportunity to acknowledge contributors, especially those from underrepresented groups.
- Recommend women, particularly women of color, for stretch assignments and speaking opportunities.
- Analyze and change gendered language that may be used in policies, procedures, job descriptions, and other written reports and documents.
- Train both women and men to react/respond appropriately when they encounter gender bias in language, behavior, or policy.
- Recognize and verbally acknowledge the leadership that women provide.
