America has more female lawmakers than ever — yet it still lags far behind other nations
Source: The Washington Post
By Adam Taylor,
The United States has never had more women in Congress than it does now. As of last week, when the 116th Congress was sworn in, 23.7 percent of the 535 members of Congress are women — roughly a quarter of the Senate and 23.4 percent of the House of Representatives.
While that’s an all-time high for the United States, it’s still far from representative: The U.S. Census Bureau says that 51.6 percent of voting-age Americans are women. And on the world stage, many countries have much higher proportions of female lawmakers in their legislatures.
According to recent data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the country with the highest percentage of female lawmakers is Rwanda, where the lower house of parliament is currently 61.3 percent female. It is followed by two Latin American countries: Cuba, where the lower house is 53.2 percent female and Bolivia, where it’s 53.1 percent female. The United States' neighbor, Mexico, is next on the list with 48.2 percent.
The United States also lags behind most other major Western democracies, including France (39.6 percent), Britain (32 percent) and Germany (30.7 percent). It would sit in 74th place in the latest IPU rankings, sandwiched between Bulgaria and Cabo Verde.
Of course, these are all countries with different political systems. Cuba and China, for example, don’t meet many people’s definitions of a democracy. The United States, meanwhile, is quite unusual in that the two chambers of its national legislature are roughly equal in stature (and at this point, roughly equal in gender equality).
Click here to read the full article published by The Washington Post on 8 January 2019.
By Adam Taylor,
The United States has never had more women in Congress than it does now. As of last week, when the 116th Congress was sworn in, 23.7 percent of the 535 members of Congress are women — roughly a quarter of the Senate and 23.4 percent of the House of Representatives.
While that’s an all-time high for the United States, it’s still far from representative: The U.S. Census Bureau says that 51.6 percent of voting-age Americans are women. And on the world stage, many countries have much higher proportions of female lawmakers in their legislatures.
According to recent data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the country with the highest percentage of female lawmakers is Rwanda, where the lower house of parliament is currently 61.3 percent female. It is followed by two Latin American countries: Cuba, where the lower house is 53.2 percent female and Bolivia, where it’s 53.1 percent female. The United States' neighbor, Mexico, is next on the list with 48.2 percent.
The United States also lags behind most other major Western democracies, including France (39.6 percent), Britain (32 percent) and Germany (30.7 percent). It would sit in 74th place in the latest IPU rankings, sandwiched between Bulgaria and Cabo Verde.
Of course, these are all countries with different political systems. Cuba and China, for example, don’t meet many people’s definitions of a democracy. The United States, meanwhile, is quite unusual in that the two chambers of its national legislature are roughly equal in stature (and at this point, roughly equal in gender equality).
Click here to read the full article published by The Washington Post on 8 January 2019.