What Are the Main Motivations to Leave Local Government?
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Most men in local government who were surveyed left to chase other career interests while women mostly cited issues with leadership.
Career changes in local government aren’t always motivated by a single cause, but seeking better pay and benefits is a big one, according to a recently released “Push/Pull” study from Emerging Local Government Leaders.
Pursuing other career interests and burnout were the second- and third-most common causes cited by local government leavers, out of 135 responses examined by researcher Kim Sandoval.
While 48 percent of respondents provided a single cause for leaving, the average was 2.1 reasons per person. When Sandoval broke the numbers down by gender, both women and men responded in the 20 percent range that compensation was a factor for leaving:
However, if we look at the highest response by gender, male respondents’ number one answer (34%) was to explore other career interests and the second was increased compensation (23%). For women, the number one response (29%) was issues with leadership team. Their next reported level was 25%; female respondents reported both burnout and increased compensation at this level, followed very closely by work/life balance at 24%.
When broken down by government position served, data indicates that issues related to department leadership provided the largest, single reason for leaving with 40 percent citing maintaining a work-life balance.
Among responses other than the provided options, lack of advancement and political reasons for leaving stood out.
Sandoval continues to filter the data:
It’s interesting to explore the responses more closely and look at both gender and level served in relation to their answers, to see more detail in the respondents’ answers . . . Since we allowed for multiple responses, the number of respondents is particularly low when we subset the answers in this way.
Still she garners some interesting, anecdotal trends, like how work-life balances were hard to maintain for women who are department heads and women who serve as assistants to the chief administrative officers. Women in CAO positions themselves frequently counted burnout as a reason for leaving local government.
Such trends move ELGL closer its #13percent initiative’s goal of identifying why that number of women in local government leadership positions hasn’t changed in 30 years.
