Executive Secretary to LDS General Authorities Speaks Out - Camille Jones Pt 2 - Mormon Stories 1478

Inside the LDS Church Office Building: What an Executive Secretary's Testimony Reveals About Structural Inequality

When Camille Jones took a position as an executive secretary to LDS General Authorities after her mission, she believed she had glimpsed the inner workings of ecclesiastical power. What she actually witnessed, according to her detailed account on Mormon Stories Podcast (Episode 1478, Part 2), was a bureaucratic machine where women's labor was systematized, underutilized, and constrained by the church's patriarchal organizational structure. Her testimony offers one of the most candid insider perspectives on gender dynamics within the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, raising uncomfortable questions about institutional efficiency, leadership development, and the long-term psychological costs of structural exclusion.

Jones's experience wasn't incidental workplace frustration. It was a years-long pattern that illuminates how the church's commitment to male-only priesthood leadership translates into concrete organizational disadvantage for women in administrative roles, even at the highest levels of institutional power.

Background: A Young Woman's Administrative Immersion

After returning from her mission, Jones was recruited by her former mission president, then serving as director of internet prosecuting for the missionary department, to work as an administrative assistant. She entered the role with what she now describes as a romanticized 1950s vision of herself: a woman with a notebook, participating in substantive decisions, walking into her supervisor's office with ideas.

The reality proved different. The missionary department's organizational structure was deliberately male-centric. According to Mormon Stories, the church preferred to hire returned missionaries as staff, which inherently limited female advancement since women missionaries had lower tenure and were fewer in number. This wasn't accidental, it was intentional staffing policy designed to cultivate male leadership pipelines.