From Data to Diversity 2025: The Demographics of New Jersey's Appointed Officials

Executive Summary

New Jersey relies on appointed officials serving on state boards, commissions, and authorities to oversee critical government functions, advise the governor and state departments on important policies, and protect the public’s interests. The policy areas appointed officials govern include economic development and finance, transportation and infrastructure, public health and safety, arts and culture, ethics, professional licensing, and many more. Yet a scarcity of available data has made it difficult to know how closely those appointees reflect the demographics of the state’s population. The New Jersey Legislature passed legislation three years ago attempting to address this knowledge gap by mandating the collection and analysis of the demographics, specifically race, ethnicity, and gender, of the state’s appointed officials. The legislation directed the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University to conduct this study. Our first report, released in 2023, found significant disparities in representation by race, ethnicity, and gender. In this report, we provide the latest data on the demographics of the state’s appointed officials. Unsurprisingly, our analysis reveals continued underrepresentation in appointed positions for women and among certain racial/ethnic groups while highlighting the ongoing systemic challenges in studying appointees, including decentralized record-keeping on state appointees within the state administration. We recommend steps to increase transparency about appointee demographics, expand awareness of appointment opportunities, and ensure more diverse representation in these crucial positions.

 

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Data Collection Methodology

This report is a second report in a series; the first report was published in 2023. For the previous report, CAWP partnered with the Center for Public Interest Polling to conduct a survey of all currently serving officials appointed to statewide and regional boards and commissions in New Jersey to collect demographic data. Our attempts to collect demographic information from over 400 New Jersey state boards and commissions revealed several systemic challenges. Without a centralized database of active boards, reliable contact information, or support from the governor’s office, comprehensive data collection proved impossible. The low survey response rate further complicated our efforts. Learning from the data collection challenges for that report, CAWP adopted a different approach for the next round. 

For this report, we built upon our existing dataset, retaining demographic data for appointees who remained in office from our previous report. For new appointees, we determined gender and race/ethnicity codes by direct contact,or expert proxy coding – using public statements, and other means. Updates were made by comparing the previous list of officials to identify new appointees and remove those no longer serving. The decision was also made to continue to collect data for a selected list of 53 boards CAWP has tracked throughout the years as part of our Bipartisan Coalition for Women’s Appointments project.1 While the state has over 400 boards and commissions listed on its appointments website, current board membership and contact information are largely unavailable, even with direct outreach to department heads. Focusing on the selected list allowed us to provide a snapshot of the demographic makeup of state appointees. This is further explained in the findings section.

  • 1

    The original Bipartisan Coalition for Women’s Appointments list of boards and commissions included 63 boards; only 54 of those boards are currently active.

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Findings

Download NJ Appointed Officials Public Dataset (2024)

This report analyzes the gender and racial/ethnic demographics of appointed officials on state boards and commissions. The findings below are from a subset of 53 boards and commissions CAWP has tracked throughout the years as part of our Bipartisan Coalition for Women’s Appointments project. These boards are among the state's most visible boards and commissions, have high levels of responsibility and policymaking authority, or require financial disclosure. The list of boards can be found in the dataset linked above.

Please note, that the data does not include the 13.6% of the vacant positions on these boards and commissions.

Gender Diversity

Women comprise 35.9% of the appointed officials on boards included in this study, up from 33.1% in our 2023 report. For historical context, CAWP’s 2005 study of appointees found that women made up 22% of appointees on selected boards and commissions, and by 2019, this proportion had risen to 27%. While the current data illustrates a positive trend in women’s representation on appointed boards, the numbers remain far from parity. Of the 53 boards and commissions examined, three have no women members, and ten others have female representation below 15%.

Racial Diversity

White men accounted for 43.0% of appointees on the boards and commissions studied. According to 2023 U.S. Census population estimates, white men comprise 26.4% of New Jersey’s population. White men are the only overrepresented group among appointees and they are substantially overrepresented relative to their share of the population.

The disparities are stark for other demographic groups, particularly Asian American/Pacific Islanders and Latinas and Latinos. Asian American/Pacific Islanders hold under 3% of the state’s appointed offices despite comprising just over 11% of the population. Latinas and Latinos comprise 23% of the population but are only 7.1% of appointees. Given that New Jersey currently has the fourth-largest Asian American population and the eighth-largest Hispanic population in the country2, the marked underrepresentation signals a critical need for appointing authorities to make an intentional effort to ensure that they represent the communities they serve.

  • 2

    U.S. Census Bureau. "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2023 (SC-EST2023-SR11H), https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/time-series/demo/popest/2020s-state-detail.html

Coding for race in this project follows CAWP’s current method for race data collection. Appointees who identify as more than one race/ethnicity are included in each group with which they identify. As a result, percentages may not add up to 100% across levels.

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Recommendations

Strong democratic governance requires citizen engagement and participation. State leaders can take practical steps to expand opportunities and ensure broader representation on appointed boards, increasing both transparency and accountability in the appointment process.  

Accountability

First and foremost, the state needs a comprehensive, public database of all boards, commissions, and their members. While there is a list of boards and commissions on the state’s official appointments website, it is often outdated and does not have any demographic information or information about the term of office for member.3 Many of our recommendations from our previous report remain evergreen: 

  • Requiring the state to collect demographic information: State government should collect demographic information about state appointees, either on the appointment application forms or upon appointment (perhaps through mandatory ethics forms), and keep the data in a centralized and secure digital database (i.e. not maintained separately within each department). This will markedly streamline the process of collecting demographic data on appointees and ensure that the dataset of state appointed officials is consistently updated and available for analysis. Legislation should mandate this demographic data collection through the state administration to ensure continuity over time. While outside research groups such as CAWP can help conduct analysis, it would be far more efficient and effective to have the state administration collect the information as part of the appointments process.
  • Making demographic data public: Appointees’ demographic information should be provided publicly, as is done in Illinois4 and Connecticut.5 Both of these states’ demographic reports are mandated by state statute.6 Connecticut’s reporting is more comprehensive, providing the data and analysis of each board and commission’s current membership. The Illinois statute requires each governor to report on the demographics of his or her appointees; in other words, this data is collected only on new appointees and not on appointees who are holdovers from previous administrations. While it is helpful to know the demographics of a current governor’s appointees to ensure that diversity in recruitment and nomination is a priority, it does not offer a complete analysis of all board members by board, which helps pinpoint representation gaps on individual boards as well as provide a comprehensive view of representation overall. Still, Illinois’ reporting does offer helpful data on the current governor’s efforts to address diversity of state appointees.  

Transparency

On New Jersey's main boards and commissions page, each individual board listing currently includes the statute or directive explaining the board, as well as a list of board members. In the interest of transparency, ideally each listing would include:

  • A link to the board’s website and the end date for each board member’s term, as is done in Virginia.7
  • Contact information for a staff member or representative in charge of each board, as listed on Illinois’ appointments site.8 In 2011, the New Jersey legislature passed legislation (signed into law in January 2012) requiring all state authorities, boards, and commissions to establish a public website and post information related to the entity's mission, finances, meetings, and employees. Among other things, the legislation states that the web site must include “the name, mailing address, electronic mail address, if available, and phone number of every person who exercises day-to-day supervision or management over some or all of the operations of the authority, board, or commission.” In our research, we found information to be uneven across entities; most boards and commissions did have web sites but contact information for staff varied widely.
  • Board status as active or inactive. As noted earlier in this report, of the 473 boards (excluding county election boards) listed on the governor’s website, more than 90 of them were found to be inactive but were not clearly described as such. On Michigan’s online state boards and commissions list, a defunct board is clearly noted9, and a link to the final report is included with the board listing.10 In the interest of making it easier for members of the public to determine which boards they can apply for, clear documentation of defunct or time-limited boards is useful. After a certain period of time, defunct boards could be moved off the main list entirely and included on a separate, searchable archived list for historical purposes. 

Opportunity

In order to encourage more citizens to participate on state appointed boards and commissions, the state should employ more mechanisms that create as well as showcase opportunities to serve. These mechanisms include: 

  • Publicizing vacancies: Vacancies represent an opportunity for appointing authorities to enhance diversity on boards and commissions. Some states provide extensive details on board vacancies. California provides a monthly list of current state board vacancies11, and Alabama provides a list of vacancies along with information about that particular board.12 New Jersey should follow suit, posting information about vacancies along with application information.
  • Establish a formal outreach strategy for appointments: The state appointments office should formally adopt an outreach strategy to highlight state boards and commissions and the role of appointed officials in state government. Key outreach activities include partnering with community organizations, professional associations, and cultural groups to identify a larger pool of candidates. The state appointments office could also create a regular newsletter or alert system about appointment opportunities, and host information sessions about board service, especially in underrepresented communities. While many of these activities have been done by appointments offices throughout the years, adopting a formal strategy that is carried over from administration to administration is key to long-term success in the recruitment of board and commission members.
  • Simplify the application process: The state administration should develop a single, user-friendly online application platform where interested citizens can apply for multiple board positions. The application platform should include clear eligibility requirements and time commitment expectations and allow applicants to express interest in future openings. In addition, the platform should provide information to applicants as to the status of their application.
  • Legislatively-mandated efforts to balance demographic representation: Fourteen states currently have a form of “gender balance legislation” in place.13 Gender balance legislation is an institutional intervention designed to increase women’s representation on state boards and commissions. The legislation details vary widely from state to state, with different reporting requirements (including many with no reporting requirement or other accountability measure), enforcement mechanisms, and sanctions.14 While success is mixed, gender balance legislation can nonetheless serve as a model for balancing boards by various demographic representation. In New Jersey, gender balance legislation has been introduced during the two most recent legislative sessions (Bills S1149 and A943 in the 2022/23 session). This legislation is a positive step in efforts to ensure gender balance on the state’s boards. The state could look to expand legislative efforts to include other types of diversity. A proposed bill in Massachusetts seeks to ensure gender parity and racial and ethnic diversity on public boards and commissions, stating that “[e]very appointive board or commission of the state established by the Code, if not otherwise provided by law, shall endeavor to have, or explain why it does not have, (1) at least fifty percent members who self-identify as Female, and (2) at least thirty-percent members who self-identify as an Underrepresented Minority or as LGBTQ+.”15
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Conclusion

New Jersey’s public officials fail to reflect the state’s rich gender and racial diversity. Given that appointed boards and commissions have significant policymaking and regulatory authority and that this state is among the most diverse in the country, it is alarming to consider the tremendous number of voices, perspectives, and life experiences missing from these governing bodies. It is urgently critical to address this challenge with intentional efforts to enhance diversity and maximize engagement among more communities within the state.

Our findings serve as a roadmap for scholars, activists, and government officials both here in New Jersey and in other states who may want to replicate these efforts, highlighting what is possible and what obstacles need to be addressed to make databases such as these, whose information is invaluable, a reality. Uniformity and efficiency are critical to achieving the legislation’s goal: to measure and track over time the gender and racial/ethnic diversity of the state’s appointed officials. Finally, the data collection process should ultimately be housed within the state government with sufficient infrastructure for ongoing maintenance. The state must ensure this data is collected, create mechanisms for doing so, and be held accountable for reporting this information on an ongoing basis.

While this demographic data illuminates the problem of persistent underrepresentation of women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups on state boards and commissions, it also serves as a tool for tracking progress towards the goals of building more diverse governing bodies. We recommend a number of strategies aimed at providing accountability, encouraging greater citizen participation, and building transparency, and thus trust, in the state appointments process.

CAWP looks forward to continuing to collect, as best as possible, and analyzing this data in order to provide a solid baseline of information on the gender/race/ethnicity of appointed officials in the Garden State. Our hope is that, during this time, more can be done to institutionalize the collection of this information within state government.

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Acknowledgements

This project is made possible by the generous support of the New Jersey Legislature. Special thanks to the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling (ECPIP) for data support.

About CAWP

The Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is nationally recognized as the leading source of scholarly research and current data about women’s political participation in the United States. Its mission is to promote greater knowledge and understanding about the role of women in American politics, enhance women's influence in public life, and expand the diversity of women in politics and government.

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New Jersey Appointed Officials Public Dataset (2024)

Click below to download the dataset referenced in the findings section. Data was collected and is as of Spring/Summer 2024 and includes officials appointed to boards and commissions in the state.

Download Database