The number of women in state government leadership positions is on the rise, with the percentage nearly mirroring their representation in the general population in six states, a study has found.

Of the governor-appointed posts in all 50 states last year, 35 percent were held by women, up from 28 percent a decade earlier, according to the report by the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society at the University at Albany.

Researchers looked at the number of women named to top-ranking policy positions such as heads of state agencies and senior advisers and found that while women remain generally underrepresented, they've made significant strides in some key areas.

That is, however, except for South Dakota, where the number of legislators has decreased in recent years.

Among all 50 states, South Dakota ranks last in the number of women who hold leadership positions, with about one in six holding such positions. The state is just one of four in the U.S. in which women hold less than 25 percent of the state's leadership positions.

In a news story earlier this year in the Journal, Sen. Ed Olson, R-Mitchell, noted that the lack of women does impact the effectiveness of the state Legislature in dealing with important issues. "If we cut out half the population's ideas, whether good, bad, Democratic, Republican, male, female, if we're missing half, it isn't good," Olson said.

But getting more women to run for public office has been a challenge, according to some current women legislators. Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry, one of the 18 women representatives and senators in the South Dakota legislature, says the system which forces individuals to be away from their family for long stretches of time, is part of the reason few women run for office.

"That's the biggest reason I didn't run earlier," said Turbak Berry, who has two sons, 18 and 22. "I wouldn't think of leaving them for two months."

She said unless something revolutionary happens -- the session is split into several two-week intervals, or something else more family-friendly -- women are going to have a hard time participating.

Women are not the only casualties of the system, she added.

"Unfortunately there are not more women, more minorities, more younger people," she said. "It favors retired folks, it favors men and it favors people who are on a short list of occupations … We are depriving the decision-making process by restricting viewpoints."

Others say that the culture of handing down power to new, younger leaders isn't as prevalent among the state's women leaders as it is men.

Meanwhile, the trend in almost every state other than South Dakota is moving in the opposite direction.

"The most important thing is the fact that in 36 of the states, women are doing better than they were in 1997, and by better I mean as a comparison of the percentage of women in leadership posts compared with the percentage of women in the state," said Judith Saidel, the lead author and the center's director.

Saidel said the rising numbers could be attributed in part to the general strides women have made in the private sector and academia, along with a growing number of women in high-level career public servant positions who are now in line for promotions.

In Alaska, Connecticut, Montana, Nevada, Vermont and Washington, the number of women in senior policy positions is roughly even with their percentage of the general population in those states, the study found.

Although three of those states - Alaska, Connecticut and Washington - also have female governors, the research didn't show that women governors are generally more inclined than men to appoint female staff and advisers, Saidel said.

Montana is the only state where the percentage of women in top state government positions - 54.5 - actually exceeds that of women in the state's overall population - 50.2.

Three neighboring states - South Dakota, Wyoming and Idaho - are at the other end of the scale. They are among just four states - the other is Louisiana - where women hold fewer than a quarter of the top state jobs. In South Dakota, only about about one in every six state leadership jobs were held by women - the lowest rate in the nation.

Cara Eastwood, press secretary for Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, said Wyoming faces a challenge finding qualified people to fill top jobs because the state's economy is booming and government has to compete with high-paying private sector employers in hiring. But she noted that the majority of senior policy advisers on the Democratic governor's staff are women.

The university study found that agencies in areas where women have traditionally been better represented - including health, human rights and education - still have the highest number of women in leadership.

At the same time, it found a growing number of women breaking into areas traditionally dominated by men, including administration and budget. For example, Laura Anglin is New York's budget director.

The study found governors across the country have appointed 15 women to head departments of administration, and 10 to lead management and budget agencies.

Former Vermont Gov. Madeline Kunin, a Democrat who served from 1985 until 1991 and was the state's first female governor, was heartened to hear of the strides women have made. She noted that some of her appointments "raised some eyebrows" because they didn't have the typical resumes of traditional candidates for the job.

"If a woman had 10 years that she stayed at home with her family, a traditional assessment would have been that she did nothing in those years," Kunin said. "My assessment was different because I know when I was home with my kids, I was active in the schools and community organizations, and of course you learn a great deal from bringing up children."

As the number of women in high-ranking state policy positions rises, Kunin hopes, there eventually won't be a need to study the issue because it will become generally accepted that women belong in those jobs.

On the Net:

Center for Women in Government & Civil Society: http://www.cwig.albany.edu