Women remain under-represented in the majority of local offices. Per the data in the Local Elections Database:
Women won about 20% of all county elections, despite women on average representing 50% or more of the population.
In effect, women were 80% less likely than men to win a county legislative seat.
And women were less likely than men to run for office: among all the election data in our map, women made up only around 26% of all candidates for a county legislative office.
Women constitute
50.4%
of the U.S. population.
But women won only
20.44%
of all the county legislative roles displayed in the map.
And women made up only
25.92%
of candidates running for office in our current dataset.
The universe of the dataset is not fully comprehensive. First, the databse only catalogs cities, counties, and school districts with a population of at least 50,000 in 2020. And some elections have data the authors could not locate. These could exist for smaller geographic units or elections that public datasets did not reveal.
In the medium and larger-sized communities that the dataset encompasses, the message is clear: all across the country, women do not have the same representation as men. The following visualizations offer some insights into where female under-representation is happening the most.
Historically, do women serve in county legislatures?
You can change between two types of maps, a version that shows you our overall score for representation and another that breaks down the statistics:
Are women represented in the office of county legislator?
Judging on a scale from 1-10, 56% of the country gets lower than 5 for female representation in the office of county legislator.
The Local Elections Database holds the results of county legislature elections for 563 counties (out of 3,143) in the US. Here, we visualized the counties by the female gender representation. The color is assigned by a simple gender representation score given by the ratio of female county legislatures within the available data, scaled to a 10-point scale and rounded to the nearest whole number, where a 0 means that no women have been elected, a 5 indicated gender parity and a 10 overrepresentation of women. In sum, the data show nearly 56% of the county gets lower than 5 for female representation.
Data for this map was taken from the American Local Government Elections Database available at osf.io/mv5e6,
Are women represented in the office of county legislator?
If we use a traditional statistics test we find 66% of the counties exhibit a gender bias in their election results.
In this visualization, we have presented the counties according to the outcomes of the Chi-squared test, which was conducted under the assumption of a 1:1 gender distribution with a significance level of p < 0.05. The analysis reveals that approximately 66% of the counties exhibit a gender bias in their election results. This significant finding underscores the urgent need for enhanced gender representation in regional political landscapes, calling attention to the disparities that currently exist.
Data for this map was taken from the American Local Government Elections Database available at osf.io/mv5e6,
Missing Data?
Do you have a correction to the data we presented or information about a local election in the United States that we have not displayed? Please fill out our feedback form! You may also leave your contact information if you would like to discuss the project further.
Where can I learn more about this project?
We owe our original source data to the American Local Government Elections Database. If you would like to learn more about that database, you can access it online.
Our team has compiled information about our project and our use of the American Local Government Elections Database in the "About the Data tab of this website.