This blog is reprinted in part from ELGL.org blog by Emily Edmonds (web and LinkedIn). Read the full article online at ELGL.org:
Although I hate to perpetuate the “backwards country” stereotype of the types of places in which I was born and raised, I felt it was important to bring the rural woman’s perspective to the 13% discussion. Of the small percentage of female department heads in county governments near where I live, nearly all of them direct departments of public health or social services. There are no female county managers in a 100-mile radius, no female county economic developers or engineers or planners. What’s a girl to do when she wants to work in public service?
The lack of women in local government leadership is a vivid, daily issue for me, especially as a soon-to-be MPA graduate with the goal of working in rural economic development. I live and work in the county where I was born, a largely undeveloped and beautiful slice of the Appalachian Mountains, and the biggest pressure my family faces is where to relocate after I receive my MPA this fall. There’s hardly any question of staying; there are few jobs in my field, and we are still in a generational “holding pattern” in many rural local governments, where the leadership positions are held primarily by older white men still several years away from retirement….
