Report: There’s gender parity in public financing, but general administration has a ways to go

Over the last few decades, local government finance administrators have made a concerted effort to increase diversity and gender parity within their organizations. And while it’s been successful, the initiative has been hampered by the lack of an important tracking element: reliable data. 

“Historically, the United States has lacked standardized information on the hundreds of thousands of individuals leading our township, municipal, and county governments,” said Dr. Nathan Lee, professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology and managing director of CivicPulse, a software company that designs technology for local governments. “With state-of-the-art data analysis techniques, however, we can make this important information available for those trying to identify where to target their DEI efforts.”

To that end, a digital tool launched by CivicPulse in collaboration with Engaging Local Government Leaders and the Government Finance Officers Association, called the Local Government Diversity Dashboard, is a step toward resolving the issue. The online platform, which leverages “recent developments in administrative data collection and probabilistic name-based gender coding,” provides “comprehensive benchmarks on the gender composition of local government officials for all municipalities, townships, and counties with populations of 1,000 or more,” according to a recent report about the effort.

The picture of equity revealed by the data, which includes every city and county in the United States as of March 2022, is encouraging: Almost all states have surpassed gender parity in the top finance/budgeting role in local government. 

Nationwide, women hold 68 percent of America’s top public finance and budgeting roles.

“The states with the highest percentages of women top finance/budgeting officials are South Dakota (87 percent), Vermont (86 percent), North Dakota (86 percent), New Mexico (85 percent), and Wyoming (84 percent). The states with the lowest percentages are New York (49 percent), Hawaii (50 percent), New Jersey (51 percent), California (52 percent), and Illinois (55 percent),” the report says.

But while encouraging, there’s some complexity in the findings that points to areas for improvement. Organizations serving large populations are proportionately less likely to have women serving in top finance and budgeting positions. Less than half (45 percent) of communities with more than 100,000 people have a woman leading their finance or budgeting office.

And while high-ranking finance positions have traditionally been viewed as a pipeline into high ranking general government roles, it’s not that way for women. “The percentage of women in the top finance/budgeting role is more than double that of top appointed officials,” the report continues.

Only 29 percent of top appointed leaders in the public sector are women.

“The comparison of the representation of women between the two roles we have covered so far is striking. Women have a far greater chance of serving their community as a top finance/budgeting official than as a top appointed official (e.g. manager or administrator),” the report says. “Notably, the difference between the representation of women in these local government roles mirrors the difference in the workforce outside of local government. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 55 percent of financial managers are women, while only 29 percent of chief executives are women.”