You’ve heard of the “Streisand effect,” right?

It’s when an effort to censor information results in something becoming more well-known. And I can’t help but hope that’s what happens with the Utah Women and Leadership Project (UWLP).

You see, in the final minutes of the 2025 session, the Utah Legislature voted to kill the state’s Women in the Economy Commission. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Jon Hawkins, R-Pleasant Grove, said the commission’s efforts to promote equality in the economy would continue through other organizations, including the UWLP.

Then this year, the budget for the UWLP project was slashed — once again, on the final day of the session. The cuts would “eliminate most of my staff and our efforts,” founding director Susan Madsen said.

This all made me want to look into the UWLP’s work and what exactly is on the chopping block. So I opened their researchers’ latest white paper, called “Home, Health, Community, & Allyship: 2025 Utahns’ Awareness, Understanding, and Attitudes.” Basically, it’s a tracking survey, trying to understand how women and men around Utah feel about their gender roles outside of the workplace.

Its results are fascinating — and ironically, they also might help explain how the UWLP found itself in this position.

Views on women and leadership

The most recent survey from the UWLP got opinions from 5,212 Utahns in all, run in two groups. UWLP called the first a “representative” sample. It was done with Qualtrics’ standard recruitment process, which sought to match Utah demographically, as traditional polling does. The second was a “convenience” sample made up of respondents recruited through the UWLP newsletter, social media, and volunteers across the state.

Because the survey included some free-response questions, I understand why they wanted the widest possible sample. On the other hand, I’m mostly interested in what is true for the state of Utah as a whole — and the “convenience” sample will be skewed because those who subscribe to the UWLP self-select to some extent. So for the rest of this article, I’ve used the “representative” sample where available. Luckily, that sample is also quite large, good enough for real statistical results: 1,945 respondents.

We’ll start with the headline result. When 1,065 women and 880 men were asked about the statement “Utah men are interested in supporting women,” here’s what they said.

In all, just 39.2% of women could agree that Utah men are interested in supporting women. Wow.

Utah men, meanwhile, had a higher view of themselves: 68.4% said men were interested in supporting women. But even that result indicates 31.6% of men, nearly a third, believe men aren’t so inclined. Interestingly, men who scored higher on religious activity level and on income were more likely to believe that Utah men were interested in supporting women.

You see similar results when you ask if “Men in Utah are supportive of women becoming leaders.”

Here, only 36.6% of women agreed on some level, with just 8% strongly agreeing. Meanwhile, 64.2% of men felt that men in general were supportive of women in leadership.

It might be appropriate at this moment to note that 67.3% of Utah’s legislature is male, 32.7% female, according to the UWLP’s 2026 report.

The UWLP felt that some of this gap — in both actual representation and subjective support levels — was due to a lack of a pathway for women to get involved in civic life. (In fact, UWLP actually surveyed that question too: 42.8% of women said they didn’t understand how to get involved civically if they wanted to, compared to 26.3% of men.) So it’s created a number of toolkits to help solve that problem, with research, podcasts, videos, and even articles with titles like “Advice From Women Who Have Served in Public Elected Office.”

And it does seem like there’s an appetite for more equal representation in leadership. When asked if they agreed with the statement “Women are well suited for elected political positions,” only 6% of women and 7.3% of men disagreed. Optimistic, right? I mean, it’s bad that 6% to 7% of people think that, but that means most people are pretty reasonable!

Well, the age group most likely to disagree with that statement was the 18- to 24-year-olds. Oof. I am worried about the young adults.

In home and health care

The study primarily focused on gender roles in more private settings, though. Much attention has been paid to the wage gender gap (including in one of my previous columns), but the intangible gap is also significant and ripe for study.

Take the statement “In conflicts, my partner and I have an equal opportunity to express our views and influence the outcome.” Only 55% of women agreed with that statement, 45% couldn’t.

And digging into the demographics, there are some discouraging trends. For one, women who were high school graduates or only had some college were significantly more likely to feel their partnerships were unequal. Ditto for women who were unemployed and looking for work, or full-time students. Full-time employees or full-time homemakers both felt like they lived in more equal relationships.

Women were also more likely to feel the load of domestic labor was unequally shared: 22.1% of women felt it was unequal, compared to just 10% of men.

The study also asked about sexual relations with the statement, “In our relationship, I feel that my partner’s sexual needs are more important than my own.” The results: 30.3% of women agreed with the statement, 33.3% disagreed, and 36.4% said they neither agreed nor disagreed.

Again, the demographic breakdowns revealed splits. With regards to education, “women with more formal education were less likely to feel that their partner’s sexual needs were more important than their own.”

Meanwhile, women in the Spiritual but Not Religious, Latter-day Saint, and Agnostic categories were significantly less likely to agree with the statement than those who selected Hinduism or Buddhism, Islam, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Judaism — meaning the former set of women were more likely to put their sexual needs on equal or greater standing compared to their partners.

Finally, there were differences in how the genders felt about their health care in Utah. 31.2% of women didn’t agree with the sentence “I feel physically, mentally, and emotionally safe in healthcare settings.”

That’s pretty concerning, in my view, and outweighs the number of men who feel the same: 22.1%.

That being said, women and men did respond similarly to both the likelihood they’d have a preventative health care appointment in the next 12 months, and about 70% of both groups felt they were empowered to make informed decisions about reproductive health. UWLP pointed out that younger, poorer, non-white, and single women were less likely to feel confident about reproductive health than their counterparts.

Just as with leadership, UWLP has resources on how Utah localities and leaders can improve gender equity at home and in health care.

What women said

As noted above, the survey also allowed people to write long-form answers to particular questions, including about the future of women in leadership. A plurality of those asked about that, 42%, actually spoke about the growing opportunities they see for women and girls.

“Some of the greatest opportunities for women and girls in Utah include the growing support for female leadership and more women running for public office,” one respondent wrote. “When young women are empowered to take part in shaping policy and governance, they ensure that the voices and experiences of women are reflected in the decisions that impact us all,” another said.

Meanwhile, 23% gave recommendations to government on policies or programs that could help close the gender gap. “It’s important to keep listening to women and girls directly, especially those from underrepresented communities. Policies and programs should reflect their lived experiences, not just broad assumptions,” a respondent said.

A further 17% hoped for greater representation for women in state government. For example, one respondent said, “There aren’t enough female role models for girls — not enough community and government leaders who are women. Representation matters, and there is not enough female representation for girls to look to.”

Finally, 16.1% of respondents mentioned the political influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “When political and cultural norms align so closely, it can be difficult for women who diverge from those norms to be taken seriously or to find belonging. I think the greatest challenge in Utah is in navigating a society where gender expectations are defined by a single, dominant narrative,” one such respondent said.

These perspectives — of all stripes — are valuable. It’s hard to address a problem like the gender gap in Utah without understanding it, both the quantitative metrics and how our residents qualitatively feel about their lives.

The Utah Women and Leadership Project provided that. I hope the Legislature reconsiders its funding cut at the next available opportunity. And if not, I hope the UWLP’s message spreads farther and wider anyway.

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