By Emily Leuning
ELGL
Forty years ago, as Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem “I Am Woman” was topping the charts, I attended the University of Kansas’ first conference on women in public administration. We couldn’t find a woman who ran a local government to come talk to us, so instead we invited Cissy Farenthold, an attorney who was running for Texas governor at the time. Another candidate, a guy named Jimmy Carter, also came and spoke to us about the inspiration he’d drawn from his wife and mother.
This week I’m heading to KU again for a similar gathering, the Inspiring Women in Public Administration Conference. This year we’ll hear from two city managers, a county prosecutor, a director of public works, a retired police chief, a few professors – all of them women who have risen to top jobs in the field.
When you look at statistics about how many women lead local governments, it’s easy to forget how much progress has been made in the past few decades. As a student finishing my MPA in 1975, I was one of three women in the city-manager track at KU. Now many women see public administration as a viable career path, and at least anecdotally there is evidence that many MPA programs are majority female. The number of women in local government was so small at the time that we could all fit in a small room at an IMCA conference; now the women’s luncheon at ICMA takes up an entire ballroom.
But, as the #13percent discussion makes clear, we still have a long way to go. We need more women at the top in all leadership positions – city manager, county manager, certainly department heads. For a lot of reasons, family responsibilities still largely fall to women, and that can be a problem. As more women are elected to office, the numbers of women in the top administrative offices will hopefully continue to increase.
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