Rural local governments are more likely than cities to be led by women; how does your community stack up?

Percentage of top appointed officials who are women by
size of local government (CivicPulse chart)

Women are more likely to lead local governments in small, rural communities than in more urbanized areas, Nathan Lee reports for local-government research outfit CivicPulse. Nevertheless, fewer than one-third of local governments with more than 1,000 residents have appointed women to top roles, though women make up 47 percent of the U.S. workforce. How does your community stack up?

Women are most likely to lead the smallest towns: 38% of communities with a population of 1,000 to 5,000 are led by women, compared to 27% in communities of 5,000 to 10,000, Lee reports. Women are least likely (21%) to lead communities with 50,000 to 100,000 residents. The share of women in such roles has been increasing by less than 1% per year, meaning the nation as a whole won't reach gender parity among local government leaders until around 2048.

At the state level, only Alabama (which has a female governor) has reached gender parity among top local appointed officials, with 57 of 109 local governments led by women. Notably, the states with the highest share of women local leaders are disproportionately rural: "The next closest states are Idaho (48% of 33 governments), West Virginia (47% of 73 governments), New Hampshire (45% of 162 governments), and Maine (43% of 208 governments)," Lee reports.

CivicPulse bases its research on U.S. Census data compiled by market researcher Power Almanac.

Southern Baptists gather as race, gender issues and politics tribulate their convention and other evangelical churches

Revs. Ronnie Floyd and Dwight McKissic in 2014
after Floyd was elected president of the Southern
Baptist Convention. (AP photo by Steve Ruark)

The Southern Baptist Convention, which was created because of race and slavery 15 years before the Civil War, is arguing about race, sex and other touchy social issues as it prepares to convene Tuesday in Nashville. And it reflects simmering political conflicts in much of American evangelicalism.

With talk of critical race theory, "demands for political loyalty" and "a fight between conservatives and ultraconservatives, it sounds like current debates within the Republican Party," writes Sarah Pulliam Bailey of The Washington Post. The meeting will shape the future of the 14-million-member denomination, and will be "probably the largest religious gathering since the pandemic, as well as the biggest Baptist meeting in decades," with 16,000 attendees expected.

"What is especially unusual about the meeting is infighting at the highest levels of leadership that has become public in recent weeks," Bailey reports. "New details released to news-media outlets have shined a light on the backroom dealings of several of its high-profile leaders." Russell Moore, who ran the SBC's public-policy office, "recently left his position and his church for a new position at Christianity Today magazine. On his way out, two letters he sent to SBC leadership were leaked to media, in which Moore described a culture of racism and mishandling of sexual-abuse claims."

The current flash point is critical race theory, the concept that racism is a product of society, not only individuals, and is often embedded in societal institutions. "Prominent members of the SBC, including Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the denomination’s oldest academic institution, have demonized C.R.T., calling it, among other things, Marxist and anti-Biblical. Mohler, of Louisville, and south Georgia pastor Mike Stone, who has called CRT a “weapon of division,” are running for SBC president. The other candidate is Ed Litton, "a soft-spoken pastor who has been involved in racial-reconciliation efforts in Mobile, and who believes that the fight over CRT has become a way to avoid talking about the need for structural change" in the convention, Eliza Griswold reports for The New Yorker magazine.

If Litton doesn't win, that is expected to accelerate the departure of Black pastors and congregations, Griswold reports. Her object example is the Rev. Dwight McKissic of Arlington, Texas, who got SBC help to start his church 38 years ago but isn't going to the convention: "Until recently, much of the racism that he’d encountered in the SBC was 'passive,' McKissic said. But after the election of Donald Trump, in 2016, he felt that the racist rhetoric became more overt. McKissic was also unsettled by what he saw as a growing antipathy toward allowing women to serve in leadership roles in the church."

The long-simmering gender conflict in the denomination, which limits the roles of women, was highlighted this spring when "Beth Moore, a hugely popular speaker and author, stepped away from the SBC because of what she saw as its continued racism and sexism," Griswold notes.

Bailey notes that the convention, like most evangelical groups, is less of a denomination than most denominations: "The SBC prides itself in the 'autonomy' of individual churches, which operate independently but contribute to multi-million-dollar budgets for missions, seminaries and other collective efforts" of the convention. "The transactional nature of the denomination allows pastors and lay members to financially benefit from things such as pastors’ health insurance and reduced tuition rates at its schools. What matters at the convention is that individual members come forward and vote collectively to find a unifying voice on different matters and to vote for its next president."

The tribulations of the SBC reflect those in other evangelical groups and society, Baptist professors told Griswold. Karen Swallow Prior, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said she sees an “evangelical reckoning . . . These tensions reflect an emerging schism in what it means to be an evangelical. Theological conservatives are reclaiming the moral authority of following Jesus without blindly following the old battle lines of the culture wars.”

Keith Whitfield, a theology professor at Southeastern, told Griswold, “We’ve understood since 1995 that we have to open the doors for other people to come in if we’re going to remain viable for the future—if not, the effectiveness of our gospel witness will be compromised. . . . The SBC is a mirror for what’s happening in American evangelicalism, and the culture writ large.”

Ed Stetzer, a Southern Baptist who runs the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, told Griswold that churches have become increasingly politicized: “People are now sorting themselves into churches that align more with their political ideology than their theology They want the sermons they hear on Sundays to align with what they hear on cable news all week.”

Appalachian farmers hurt by pandemic can get $500 grants

Appalachian Sustainable Development will award 28 grants of $500 each to Appalachian farmers who have been financially hurt by the pandemic. The Central Appalachian Family Farm Fund grants are possible through $14,000 ASD received from the Appalachia Funders Network in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. ASD awarded 19 farmers with similar grants in July.

Priority will be given to farmers most hurt by the pandemic, and who have been most disadvantaged before the pandemic because of race, gender, or other protected classes. The grants are meant to offset loss of income and help with farm and overall expenses. Applications are due by 5 p.m. ET Dec. 14, and award checks will be mailed to the winners within 30 days. Click here for more information or to apply. 

Alltech launches 2nd Women in Food and Agriculture survey

Agricultural bio-tech company Alltech is launching its second annual Women in Food and Agriculture Survey today.

The 2019 survey was well worth the effort, according to the company's press release. It "revealed specific barriers for women in agriculture and a gap between female and male perceptions but reflected an optimistic outlook overall. As 2020 ushered in unprecedented challenges for agriculture, new questions have been added to the survey to gauge potential inequalities exacerbated by covid-19. To further globalize this effort and increase accessibility, the survey is available in multiple languages."

Click here for more information or to take the survey.

Rural Assembly Everywhere virtual festival Oct. 26-30

Rural Assembly Everywhere, a virtual festival for rural leaders, advocates and allies, is coming up Oct. 26-30. It's organized by the Rural Assembly, a Center for Rural Strategies program that connects more than 400 organizations and individuals nationwide focused on improving rural policies and communities. 

Rural Assembly director Whitney Kimball Coe said it was critical for such people to be able to gather, even if it couldn't be in person. "Family meeting feels like an appropriate metaphor for what we’re trying to accomplish with Everywhere," she told Tracy Staley of The Daily Yonder. "We’re calling everyone together, from all places, all regions, all sectors, and backgrounds because it’s going to take all us committing to the future together, and we don’t leave family behind."

The festival will feature a diverse line-up of speakers, panelists, artists, and happy hour discussions. "The keynotes, panels, and breakouts will address both current and longstanding issues, such as the 2020 election, the pandemic, gender and race, climate change and resilience, and rural and Native youth leadership," Staley reports. "The event will also include artists from across the country who will weave songs, poetry, film, and humor into the program throughout the week."

Registration is free. Click here for more information or to register.

As coal jobs decline, coalfield women win the bread, and gender power balance shifts with 'a little taste of freedom'

Letcher County, Kentucky (Wikipedia map)

Coal once provided solid employment and a comfortable living in many areas, but as the industry has declined, women who were once able to stay home have been increasingly going back to work -- and staying there.

"The share of women in the workforce rose substantially in places throughout Central Appalachia, as well as in parts of the industrial Midwest and the rural South," Campbell Robertson reports for The New York Times from Letcher County, Kentucky. "Few places have seen a more dramatic change," he writes. "For generations the archetypal worker was a brawny, coal-dusted man in reflective overalls. Just 10 years ago, nearly three-fifths of the work force was male. Now the majority is female."

Coal-mining jobs in the county fell from more than 1,300 in 2009 to under 50 in 2017, then increased to about 100 this summer. "Coal mining has always been boom-and-bust, but it is hard to shake the feeling that this might be the last bust," Robertson reports. "Some men picked up and left at word of mining jobs elsewhere, some went to work as linemen or truck drivers, and others, figuring they were too old or physically broken to start over, just dropped out of the labor force. It was as if the very identity of a Letcher County man had been declared insolvent."

Employment of women has always increased in coal country when mines lay off workers. Women once did mostly entry-level work like housecleaning or waitressing when their husbands were laid off from mines, but when coal jobs picked back up, women generally went back to staying home or cut back their hours, Robertson reports. That's partly because child care is often hard to find in rural areas, but mostly because such work wasn't nearly enough to replace a coal miner's income.

Now that coal is in a long swoon, many women are considering investing time and money in going back to school for long-term employment that pays better, helped by a state program that pays tuition and some living expenses for miners' families. Because of the area's high rates of chronic disease and addiction, health-care jobs are in demand. Women fill almost all of those nursing jobs in Letcher County. At the Mountain Comprehensive Health Corp. clinic in Whitesburg, only four of the 110 nurses are men, Robertson reports.

Employment is changing the way some women feel about themselves, and shifting the longstanding power balance between men and women in coal country, Robertson reports. Ciara Bowling, for instance, went to school to become a medical assistant when her fiancé couldn't find a mining job. But when he was finally able to get a job, she didn't drop out of school. "There was now the prospect of real independence, of not always having to defer to a husband because he paid the bills," he writes.

"Women now, they got a little taste of freedom," Bowling told Robertson. "Men has been able to do whatever the hell they want for so long, while women has had to sit in a chair and keep their legs closed and be nice and polite. Now they don’t have to. . . . All these men, they just don’t know what’s about to happen."

Study: Rural residents less likely to vote for boy named Sue

A recent study found that rural voters are less likely to pull the lever for a candidate with a feminine-sounding name, Tom Jacobs reports for Pacific Standard. What sets the study apart is that it focuses on names rather than candidates' campaigns or voters' knowledge of or perceptions about individual candidates.

The study examines the electoral success of major-party candidates in general elections for state legislative seats from 2003 to 2010. It found that candidates with names usually given to girls capture a smaller share of the vote than otherwise similar candidates with ambiguous or masculine names. "This result holds for both men and women, suggesting that voters, in this context, tend to discriminate against those sending relatively female-seeming signals: it is not failure to conform to stereotypes so much as sounding like one is female that reduces vote share," writes the study's author, Iowa State University political scientist Robert Urbatsch.

Urbatsch used Social Security Administration data, which records all given names of newborn children as well as their sex to determine the likelihood of a person's gender based on their name.  Read more here. The overall estimated difference in vote share between a candidate with a feminine name and one with a masculine name is about 1.5 percentage points, enough to make a difference in many close elections. In rural areas, it's 2.5 percentage points.

Trades once dominated by men are seeking women to boost their aging, declining workforces

Bridget Booker, journeywoman ironworker,
East Peoria, Ill. (Washington Post photo)

An aging workforce and a declining interest in vocational education are leading male-dominated industries to recruit women, Danielle Paquette reports for The Washington Post. "By 2029, all of the baby boomers will be older than 65, meaning one-fifth of the U.S. population will have reached retirement age. Millennials, the workers who would replace them, aren’t as interested in pursuing careers in the trades." Data from the National Education Association show that average enrollment in vocational education has dropped since 1990 from 4.2 credits to 3.6.

Paquette notes that another reason for the decline in male workers is that men are more likely to be addicted to opioids. Harry Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and former chief economist for the Labor Department, told Paquette, “You hear about a lack of job readiness, an inability to pass a drug test. It makes sense that these employers regard women as a group that expands the applicant pool and at a higher-quality level.”

This month the Ironworkers union "leaped to the cutting edge of the effort, becoming the first building trades union to offer up to eight months of paid maternity leave to pregnant women and new moms," Paquette writes. "Not that many of their folks hauling rebar or scaling skyscrapers will take them up on the offer: Only 2 percent of the group’s 130,000 North American members are women."

Eric Dean, president of the union, said they "want to attract and retain more journeywomen, who tend to quit at a higher rate," Paquette reports. Dean told her, "The whole world is suffering the baby-boomer retirement tsunami. All the construction trades are in competition for capable people. We have to innovate if we want different results."

Cate Taylor, a professor of gender studies and sociology at Indiana University, said one problem is "recruiting women into a historically male space—and keeping them around—isn't as easy as adding family-friendly benefits," Paquette writes. For instance, a Labor Department study found that almost 90 percent of female construction workers have dealt with sexual harassment on the job.

States with large rural populations slowest to make progress in advancement of working women

States that have been slowest to make progress in advancement of women's employment and earnings have large rural populations, mostly centered in the South, led by West Virginia, which ranks last among the 50 states and Washington, D.C., says a report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

The study, the first of a seven-part series, used four components: median annual earnings for women who work full-time, year-round; the gender earnings ratio among full-time, year-round workers; women’s labor force participation; and the percent of employed women who work in managerial or professional occupations.

Washington, D.C. received the highest score, followed by Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Alaska and Vermont and Virginia. All those regions earned a B grade or higher. On the opposite spectrum, West Virginia was given an F. Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas also received an F. Montana and Alabama were given a D-minus; a D went to Utah, South Dakota, Kentucky, Indiana and South Carolina; and D-plus was given to Oklahoma and Florida. (IWPR map: For an interactive version click here)

Women earn less than men, and fewer women than men work, especially in mostly rural states

Women's annual salaries remain lower than men's in several rural states, and many rural states are severely lacking in equal pay for men and women, says a report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Women have the lowest median annual earnings in Arkansas, Mississippi, South Dakota and West Virginia, at $30,000, and Louisiana has the worst ratio of earnings between men and women. The report, which also looked at the percentage of women in the workforce and percentage of women in managerial or professional occupations, gave West Virginia and Alabama overall grades of F.

West Virginia, which was ranked last of all states and Washington, D.C., was ranked 49th for earnings ratios between men and women, last for percent of women in labor force and 44th for women in managerial or professional occupations. Alabama, ranked 50th overall, was 43rd in median salary, at $31,200, 46th in earnings ratios between men and women, 50th in percent of women in labor force and
42nd for women in managerial or professional occupations.

"Women in West Virginia are making less now than they were in 2010—when women were making 69 percent of what a man makes, as compared to 66 percent today, according to the report," Mackenzie Mays reports for the Charleston Gazette. Tara Martinez, executive director of the West Virginia Women’s Commission told Mays, "We’re actually moving backward,. The discouragement and the hopelessness that I see as part of my job. I take it home with me. Sometimes you look at where women are, especially in this state that we all love so much, and you say, ‘OK, what hope do I give them?’ The hope that I try to convey is that their voice is the only way to make the change that they need to make their lives better in this state.”

Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Wyoming were given a D-; Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma and Kentucky were given a D; and Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah were given a D+. Washington D.C. was the only area to receive an A. (Institute for Women’s Policy Research map)

Study: Female school-board members less likely to speak in meetings, especially if men in majority

School boards are mostly gender-balanced, with more than 40 percent of school board members nationally being female. But a study cited in the new book The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions, found that "Unless they make up a supermajority of a board, women don't comment and endorse motions as often as men do," Sarah Sparks reports for Education Week.

The study, conducted by Brigham Young University and Princeton University, examined the minutes from 87 schools boards in 20 states, "analyzing how often men and women commented and made motions or initiated other actions during meetings," Sparks writes. Researchers looked at the number of men and women on the board, and the number of times each spoke. They found that women spoke disproportionately less than men, especially when they were outnumbered, Sparks writes. Women "only made motions as often as the men on their boards when they made up at least 60 percent of the board, and only commented as often as men when they made up 70 percent or more of the board. When in the minority, women used fewer than three-quarters of their fair share of speaking opportunities. In an 80-20 split, women in the minority contributed less than 15 percent of the conversation."

The study was similar to a 2012 University of Arizona study "that collected and analyzed recorded samples of conversations of female and male scientists," Sparks writes. "It found that when women spoke about science to other female scientists, they sounded and felt competent and engaged; when talking to male scientists about science, they felt and sounded less competent and reported less engagement—a reaction the researchers in that study attributed to women feeling subconsciously threatened by the stereotype of women being 'bad at science.'" (Read more)