Are women well represented in local offices?

A Numbers Breakdown

Women remain under-represented in the majority of local offices. Per the data in the Local Elections Database:

Women won less than 15% of all county executive elections, despite women on average representing 50% or more of the population.
In effect, women were 83% less likely than men to win a county executive position.
And women were less likely than men to run for office: among all the election data in our map, women made up only around 16% of all candidates for a county executive position.

Women constitute

50.4%

of the U.S. population.

But women won only

14.18%

of all the county executive roles displayed in the map.

Women made up only

15.98%

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 as county executive?

I want to just look for my county

You can search through all available counties to see per-county results. Here, female representation is represented by the ratio of female county executives for the same county within the available data:

Searchable Table Select County Name:

I want to see the country as a whole

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:

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.

Visit the American Local Government Elections Database

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.

About the Data

About the Team

Would you like to learn more about how we analyzed the data? You can check out our team's page on GitHub for that information.

Access Our Project Data and Documentation

Finally, if you would like to access the data we used directly, you can download the files.