Representation isn't just lacking in the legislature.
There's also big disparities on state and local boards where members get appointed.
A new report released by the Rutgers Center for Women in American Politics finds New Jersey falls painfully short in terms of diversity among appointed public officials.
The report calls it an alarming finding, given the power and authority of those boards and shows no other demographic comes even close to the number of white men who make up most of the representation of appointed positions.
For more on the report, I'm joined by Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Rutgers Center for American Women in Politics.
Jean, welcome.
Let's get into this.
So your report largely finds that these boards don't look like the people they're representing.
What do they look like?
Who is sitting in these seats?
Yes.
Thank you so much for having me to talk about this important issue.
So what we studied are the demographics of state boards and commissions.
We found that perhaps unsurprisingly to some people, white men are dramatically overrepresented on these boards and commissions.
They make up about 45% of the seats, despite being about 27% of the state's population.
We found that women are underrepresented.
There are about 33% of all of seats, so that's one in three seats are held by women.
We also broke it down by different racial and reason and ethnicity, and we found that there's dramatic disparities among the groups.
And in fact, no group comes even close to the level of representation in the population on appointed boards and commissions.
For example, Asian-Americans are 11% of the state's population, but only 3% of the seats on these boards.
Which basically means that, you know, we have many groups in the state who are not represented when it comes to, you know, important policy making decisions at these tables.
And we really need to do more to encourage and more groups to join the table and also to to bring some transparency to the process.
Yeah.
What type of boards and commissions are we talking?
What kind of decision making power do they have?
So these are skateboards and commissions.
They are, you know, positions that are appointed by the governor and some by the state legislature.
They they range in terms of their policymaking power, but they are regulatory boards.
They regulate everything from environmental issues to our transportation.
There's, you know, New Jersey Transit, the Turnpike Authority to the Arts Commission, to various commissions studying, you know, working on water quality issues and safety.
consumer boards.
All of these are really important.
And they play a role in government and affect the lives of New Jerseyans.
Yeah.
So we all need the.
Gamut of voice.
Yeah.
So this was the first study of its kind.
Why is that?
Well, first of all, it's hard to study demographics.
I mean, you have to we were largely rely on, you know, self-identification in surveys.
And it's hard to get people to answer survey.
But, you know, one of the recommendations of the report is that the state collect this information upon appointments.
And I know the Murphy administration has started doing that.
It's a step in the right direction.
But it's just it's hard to get this information.
It just doesn't exist.
And it's, you know, to build a dataset from scratch is a hard endeavor, but it needs to be something the state government is committed to going forward.
Yeah, but I'm guessing without that I'll say oversight or that data in front of you.
It's hard to make any changes in terms of representation.
So what else do you all recommend?
So we recommended a number of things.
One of the immediate recommendations is that the list of boards and commissions on the state's website, any citizen can go to this list and look and see what boards and commissions are there, what they might want to volunteer for and put an application in.
But one of the challenges we found in our study is that of the I think there are about 475 forwards listed on the website and almost 100 of them were inactive.
So, you know, again, it's it's hard then if you're someone who wants to make a difference but you don't know this board is inactive, you wouldn't it wouldn't help you at all.
Right.
So one of the recommendations is, you know, cleaning up the list.
Another recommendation is posting vacancy is finding more ways to educate the public about these, you know, opportunities.
And then it has to be intentional.
You have to collect data on the demographics of who is serving and do a study like this to be able to say, here are the representation gaps and here's the work we need to do, and then do some intentional recruiting to bring in those voices that are missing.
All right, Jean Sinzdak for us.
Jean, thanks so much.
Oh, thank you so much.
Appreciate it.