Lincoln Monument

Gender and Multicultural Leadership:
The Future of Governance

The Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project (GMCL) is a national study of America’s political leadership in the 21st century, with a focus on race, ethnicity, and gender.  The project specifically addresses African American, Latina/o, Native American, and Asian American elected officials in U.S. politics. 

This project is timely given America’s demographic change and its impact on the country’s leadership ranks. The 2000 U.S. Census points to an urgent need to understand the role of gender and race/ethnicity in today’s elected leaders and how this increasingly diversified leadership is becoming incorporated into the governing structures of a nation projected to be “majority-minority” within the next fifty years.

Project goals include: to provide baseline data on multicultural leadership in the 21st century; provide comparisons within/across groups by race/ethnicity and gender; identify prospects for coalition and/or competition; examine empirically the category of “women of color”; and expand scholarship, especially in the area of intersectionality and political representation.

Key components of the GMCL Project include a national database of more than 10,000 elected officials of color, by race and gender; an annotated bibliography and analytical framework on the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, class; and an interactive project website.

Principal Investigators:
Christine Marie Sierra, University of New Mexico;
Carol Hardy-Fanta, University of Massachusetts Boston;
Dianne M. Pinderhughes, University of Notre Dame; and
Pei-te Lien, University of California Santa Barbara.

Research Associate: Lorrie Frasure, University of California, Los Angeles.

Research Assistants: Paige Ransford, University of Massachusetts Boston.

This project was funded by a generous grant from the Ford Foundation.

For more information on the project and findings from the survey, please contact the Principal Investigators.

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