Map Tool
​This tool provides users the opportunity to explore the current gender composition of local government leadership for different states. You can access additional information by hovering your cursor over any state on that map. If you want to compare the gender composition by county, first choose a state from the dropdown menu. At that point, you’ll see additional information about the counties within that state pop up! This interactive tool is best viewed on desktop.
Methodology
Whether a local government is considered to have a top appointed official is based on Power Almanac’s assessment of the duties and responsibilities of the role. To be considered a top appointed official in this dataset, a person must be appointed by the elected governing body and be responsible for running the day-to-day operations of the government. Based on this assessment, approximately 9,500 of the 21,000+ local governments in our data base were coded as having a top appointed official (and zero local governments in Hawaii!).
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Using the historical Social Security baby name database, CivicPulse researchers then computed the probability that the first name associated with each top appointed official in Power Almanac’s database has been associated with a man or a woman. Each name that could be coded with greater than 97% confidence was then assigned a gender. This tool then aggregates this data to the state and county levels (based on 2022 records).
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For further information about the gender-coding methodology, please see the FAQ.