On Oct. 5, the Utah Women and Leadership Project released its 2023 update of its brief on the status of women on Utah boards and commissions. This is the third of these briefs the organization has conducted; the other two were in 2016 and 2019.
The purpose of this brief is to find out what percentage of seats on state boards and commissions in Utah are held by women.
Susan Madsen, the organization's founding director and the Karen Haight Huntsman endowed professor of leadership at USU, said that gathering this information and making it public is important because of the impact these boards and commissions have.
“If there are only men or mostly men, decisions are made differently than if there are more equal numbers of men and women, and if there's people of color, the experiences are different. And so when you have boards that are all men, you tend to not have representative decisions made,” Madsen said.
This year’s brief had information from 416 boards and commissions, totaling 3,215 members. They found that 61.2% of the seats are held by men, and 38.8% are held by women. In comparison, women held 32.7% of the seats in 2019.
Madsen added that Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson have made it a priority to get more women seated in these groups, and make them more representative of Utah's population.
“The governor has asked all agencies in the state government to make changes to make all of their boards and commissions more representative of the general population," Madsen said. "And so when you take and put that in your strategy, things start happening.”
Madsen said the increase seen in women holding these seats is partially due to this push from the governor.
