Every day, in every state, city and county in America, women are doing the hard job of making government work.
They’re on the front lines, delivering crucial services to residents. They’re managing teams, departments and agencies, ensuring efficiency and efficacy in public sector operations. They’re leading city halls and state governments, envisioning and building a new future for communities across the country.
Cheriene Floyd
Two decades ago, Cheriene Floyd landed her first job in government as a budget analyst in Broward County, Florida. She worked under two female mentors who stressed the importance of using data to back up budget decisions. “They’d say, ‘This major multimillion-dollar department wants additional workers, and it’s your job to teach them to look at their data to make the case for additional personnel,’” Floyd recalls. “For a 24-year-old, it was a lot of responsibility and a good test of my analytical abilities.”
The job also has Floyd on the frontlines of artificial intelligence as city leaders look at ways to experiment with AI. She’s on the lookout for applications that help solve real problems. And Floyd loves to spread the word when she finds AI tools that enhance her own work. “I am often tapping the women in my network in the city to say: You need to learn how to do this. You need to be using this tool to boost your productivity and creativity, in and out of work.”
Jean Stothart
When Jean Stothert won election in 2013, she became Omaha’s first-ever female mayor. Now, after three successful terms, a generation of children in this city of half a million people have never known anything else. It was a long path to get there. As a nurse in St. Louis, Stothert rose to become head nurse and department head of the cardiovascular surgery unit at St. Louis University. A job move for her husband brought the two of them to Omaha. Stothert traded late-night nursing shifts for a post on the local school board, where she served 11 years and developed a taste for grassroots politics. Stothert credits her successful campaigns for a city council seat and then the mayor’s office to tireless door knocking.
“It was a man’s world,” Stothert says, recalling the doors some people closed in her face. “I had a lot of people say to me things like, ‘Honey, why don’t you go back and run for school board, that’s what women do.’ That only gave me encouragement to work even harder.”
Stothert proved her skeptics wrong at every turn. In a dozen years as mayor, she’s overseen a 12% reduction in the property tax rate and crime rates that trend below Omaha’s peer cities. And she’s fueled partnerships that brought in hundreds of millions of private dollars to help pay for new riverfront parks and a central library. In 2024, Forbes named Omaha the nation’s best city to move to.
Stothert says she speaks with many women who are considering running for office but “hesitate because they don’t have the confidence to move forward.” Her advice: “You’re never going to win if you don’t run.”
Gretchen Hunt
As a lawyer, advocate and state official, Gretchen Hunt has championed the rights of survivors of domestic violence for more than two decades. Today, she does that and more leading Louisville’s Office for Women.
Hunt’s signature initiative is the Office for Women Ambassadors. It’s a six-month leadership development program that brings together a diverse group of 26 women from every council district. Ambassadors spread the word in their neighborhoods about services available to women, and they keep an ear out for emerging needs and concerns among women who live there. One ambassador launched a program, which is now receiving city funds, focused on creating economic opportunities for survivors of domestic violence.
Hunt sees activating networks of women in this way as a sort of community infrastructure that enables better governance. “Governments are based on hierarchy, and a lot of narratives around women’s power have to do with individuals rising up a ladder,” she says. “I’m less interested in that, and more interested in collective shared power and networks that institutionalize that. This is a good strategy, not just for women and gender equity, but for government.”
Other priorities for Hunt include a project aimed at designing safer and more engaging public spaces for women and girls, as well as a program that has helped 18 women who are refugees open home-based childcare operations. “What inspires me is that there’s a mass of women who want to be seen, heard and at the table,” she says. “That’s what keeps me going. How do we tap into that? How do we as a government bring in those women and get them going?”
Amy Tong
As the head of a $67 billion agency running the inner workings of California state government, Amy Tong likes to put herself in the shoes of a resident and ask: How would I want government to work for me?
It’s a deeply personal question for her. When she was a child, Tong’s family immigrated from China and needed government to help get on their feet. “We came with practically nothing and depended on public services to get our family indoctrinated into the community,” Tong says. “I have a passion to draw from this personal experience. If I was at the receiving end for public services, what would I like to see?”
That question animates Tong’s approach to everything from streamlining rules for small businesses to bid on state contracts to making it easier to apply for state jobs. Tong believes in engaging users of services and systems in the process of redesigning them — something that may sound obvious but often gets neglected in government. She’s also exploring using generative AI as a tool to help rewrite the language of public-facing information in a way that removes jargon and is easier for people to read in English and other languages.
“I’m always curious about how things can be done differently,” Tong says. “It’s the innovation mindset. I would be so bored if I’m just repaving the cowpath, just doing repetitive things. Heck no! That’s not how we do things here.”
