Women Employees are an Asset, not a Liability, to Local Governments
They could be your organization’s greatest asset in this hiring crisis. I’m here to try to sell you my case.
I’m going to cut right to the chase with two broad statements here:
Local government needs more women to fill its many, many open roles.
Many local governments have not yet created a space that can truly support women to be a part of their organization.
The numbers behind the need in the Local Government workforce
In the post-COVID workforce shakeup, many organizations are left struggling to fill position vacancies. Local government was not an untouched industry by any means. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data for Q1 and Q2 of this year show that 522,000 employees have left their jobs in State and Local Government (excluding education from that data) from January-May 2022. 1.1-1.2% of the State and Local Gov workforce is quitting on a monthly basis nationally. Now, these numbers by both quit rate and percentage are lower than many other industries have experienced, but it’s a new norm that local government doesn’t seem to be prepared to manage (Source).
State and Local Governments have long counted on the stability and desirability of the benefits of public sector jobs to draw applicants. That’s not the case any longer – Route Fifty reported in 2021 that local gov job applications have dropped by 32%. That number has continued to climb, now down to a 56% drop in applications. The reasons why this is the case aren’t the subject of this piece (although this article and our source for these percentages is a great read).
This is having a devastating impact on the people who remain in the workplace. While more than half a million positions are opening in State and Local Government on a monthly basis in Q1 and Q2 of this year (Source). In fact, less than 20% of those position openings are being filled on a monthly basis according to hiring rates (Source). It’s a recipe for burnout and more turnover if positions can’t be filled.
What we need to grapple with are the facts that people are leaving State and Local Government in droves and they simply aren’t attracting the candidates to fill those roles.
So what does this have to do with women?
For a number of reasons, women were far more likely to leave the workforce during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic (Source). It’s been dubbed the “shecession” in some instances. Women’s labor force participation rate have not yet fully recovered and still lag behind the male labor force participation rate by a full ten percentage points (Source). Women of color and women of school-age children who may not have access to reliable or affordable childcare in the summer are the most likely to be non-participants in the labor force during the summer months. These women, with the right benefits to support them, could be filling these vacancies in local government (Source).
Now that I’ve laid out the business case for WHY State and Local governments need more women, you need to have a few basic points sink into leadership’s collective mindset. I’ll keep it short and simple.
5 Realizations Local Governments need to come to on this topic
Providing benefits to support women in your organization is not an inconvenience. It’s an insurance policy to ensure you attract and retain employees (yay! We love that, right?) … in this case, employees who happen to be women.
Hiring women employees is not an excuse to pay them less. I’ve heard horror stories of back-room conversations in local government where leadership will question if a woman candidate “needs that much money” if their husband works, yet in the same breath advocate for a man to be paid more in that role “so that he can support his family”. You are actively perpetuating a financial gap for families if you insist that only men can be breadwinners in households. This also ignores the reality of non-hetero families. Should a two-woman household just live with less because there’s not a male breadwinner?
Establishing boundaries is worthless if you won’t firmly stand up to those who violate boundaries. Support the safety of women by setting firm boundaries about what is and isn’t acceptable in the workplace. And stand behind it. Violators who make your employees feel unsafe have zero business being in your workplace. Telling a woman employee “I’m sure he didn’t mean it” when someone says something inappropriate is actively protecting the perpetrator at the expense of the victim.
Flexible policies for employees aren’t an “unfair advantage” for women. Trusting your employees and offering them flexibility in their job is a benefit that may help women who are mothers, but it is also valuable to ALL other employees, too. Perhaps a male employee who is a father would like to take advantage of flexibility because he wants to pick up his kids at school. Perhaps a woman who is not a parent has a caregiving responsibility and flexibility is key to help meet that need. Offering a benefit that works for parents is one of those “a rising tide lifts all boats” examples.
Making strides to make your organization more inclusive is the right thing to do AND therefore it will draw more candidates to your organization. A more highly sought-after organization will attract the best quality candidates.
