Dr Susan Madsen courtesy USU Extension
LOGAN — Research recently looked into the population of areas of Utah in contrast to representation in municipal governments and municipal leadership in general. One of the authors of the survey and study that was published by Utah State University, Dr. Susan Madsen was on KVNU’s For the People program on Wednesday, and said this was research that was difficult to conduct.
“It was. And we were actually surprised…this is our third in a series we’ve released. The first one was how we compare in terms of men and women in the state government. Then we did one on the county government, and then this one is on cities and towns,” she said.
Dr Madsen said what they found out when they did literature review was that the study was unique to Utah and they could not find one other state that has published information like that. USU’s Utah Women in Leadership project looked at data from 247 cities and towns in Utah and found that women hold just 29 percent of elected and non-elected positions in municipal government.
“And if you look at the appendix of our brief, we actually give numbers and percentages of every single city and where they’re at in terms of the percentage of women leaders overall. And the percentage of women in elective positions within those cities. So if you had looked at that, or our listeners want to look at that, it’s really fascinating to see the wide variety of differences in those percentages between cities.”
She said for this particular study they were not able to gather exact numbers of how many women are employed overall by cities and towns in the state. But the disparity was seen when it came to those in executive positions. To see the breakdown of the survey, visit usu.edu/uwlp/index.
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