Women are on track to have equal representation in Congress... in a mere 107 years! Such are the findings of a new study conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which projects that women will make up half of Congress in 2121.
We’d like calculate the rate at which we’d be 'leaning in' in miles-per-hour, but as everyone knows, our girl brains are really bad at math. Plus we’re so depressed at this news we think we’ll be tied up at a bar for a while. Safe to say, though, glaciers would probably beat us.
And we can’t even tell if it’s a bright spot or just more depressing that Iowa is making headlines because, for the first time ever, a woman *might* get elected to Congress this fall. Can we just meditate on that for a second? Literally no Iowan with a vagina has ever made it to Capitol Hill. Reminder: it’s 2014.
Major props to our Iowan female federal office contenders, as Congress needs all the estrogen it can get; it’s currently at less than 20% women. Gah. Congress. More like Dongress, amirite?
Oh, and in case you were wondering, when it comes to women of color, we are extra super pathetic—there have only been two female Senators of color. Ever. And a mere 49 women of color to serve in the House of Representatives in history. Wasn't our form of government supposed to be representative or something?
But Kelley, maybe it’s just Congress where we’re falling short!
Oh wait, no. That’s right, we’re shitting the bed across all three branches of government. A recap: we’ve had four female Supreme Court justices ever in the history of the universe and, oh yeah, no female presidents. At least doing that math was easy?
This all amounts to us looking pretty sad on the international front as well. In the most recent Global Gender Gap Report, produced by the World Economic Forum, the U.S. ranked 23 overall, which isn’t too shabby, we guess. But in the category of Political Empowerment? We’re 60th out of 136 countries. Both Burundi and the Philippines rank higher than we do in terms of women in government. Savor that for a second.
We're obviously not throwing shade on our women leaders across oceans (major love, ladies!) but like whatever happened ‘Murica being number one in the world, y’all? Wasn't American exceptionalism supposed to be a thing?
OK. So what’s holding us lady-folk back? According of Marni Allen, executive director of the Political Parity group, who agrees with us on the study that “we can’t wait 107 years to ensure women’s voices are equally represented in the halls of government,” our slow process is due to a “lack of access to well-resourced networks” for women, “hyper-partisanship,” and a “lack of diversity among current officeholders.”
We guess that's a more precise way of saying, sexism is the very air we breathe. I mean, we recently saw a prominent female journalist, Diane Sawyer, ask America's only potential serious female contender in the upcoming election, Hillary Clinton, if she could "savor being a grandmother" if she were president. Real talk!? Sigh. We clearly don't need a study to tell us just how incredibly far we have to go.
Sometimes even the year 2121 seems ambitious.
