County governing boards: where are all the women?

Women in Local Government

“…In an early study, MacManus (1996) noted that “that the proportion of women serving on county governing boards is smaller than any type of elective body other than the U.S. Congress” (p. 66). Evidence suggests even Congress has passed counties in women’s representation: more than half of county boards have no women on them (Kellogg et al 2017), and county boards are the office with the lowest level of representation of nonwhite women (Swain and Lien 2017). For example, Latinas are less than 20 percent of Latino county board members.…”

Predicting college students' future intentions to engage in public-sphere water conservation behaviors

“…The finding related to gender does not agree with Koehler and Koontz (2008), who found males were more likely to engage in one specific type of public-sphere behavior (active participation in a cooperative watershed group). However, because Koehler and Koontz did not control for level of political involvement in their analysis, their finding of greater male participation in cooperative watershed groups may simply reflect males' higher level of involvement in local government entities (Leander et al, 2019), not a greater commitment to public-sphere water conservation behaviors. Further research is needed to better understand this relationship.…”

Council Size Matters: Filling Blanks in Women’s Municipal Representation in New Jersey

“…These findings reveal that while there is theoretical agreement that larger legislative bodies should yield a greater percentage of elected women, the empirical results have yet to confirm this claim at the local level. What Kellogg et al (2019) do find, however, is a positive effect of the number of seats on county boards on the election of at least one woman to that board (Kellogg et al 2019). In other words, increasing the size of local legislative bodies appears to lead to a greater likelihood that there will be some minimal presence of women on boards.…”

“…For instance, decades of scholarship indicate that the size of the legislature (here the council size ), measured as the number of seats, affects the representation of women since women often do better in larger than in smaller legislatures (e.g., Frederick 2010, 116; Dahl and Tufte 1973, 84; Matland 1998). However, in a recent study of cities with populations over 100,000, Bingle (2016) found no significant relationship between the number of seats at the city council and the level of women’s representation, while another study of county boards actually found a negative correlation between number of seats and percentage of female representatives (Kellogg et al 2019). These findings reveal that while there is theoretical agreement that larger legislative bodies should yield a greater percentage of elected women, the empirical results have yet to confirm this claim at the local level.…”