United States of America

When Elizabeth Warren was first approached to run for public office in 2011 by Emily's List president Stephanie Schriock, she said no. She had a plan for her life and government service was not a part of it. As she tells this story at Monday’s Emily’s List Eastern Regional Conference in New York, the 300-person audience erupts in laughter. It is hard to picture Senator Warren (D-Mass) doing anything other than igniting government into action.

n response to President Obama’s challenge to other heads of state to break down barriers to women’s political and economic participation, former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Valerie Jarrett launched the Equal Futures Partnership on behalf of the United States in September 2012.

Once women voters were considered to be a sure thing for Democratic candidates, but the tide appears to be turning, according to last week’s poll by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. That news has top Democrats out in full force, stumping for the votes that they thought they had in the bag. It comes as no surprise to the PolitiChicks, authors of the bestselling book, What Women Really Want.

There is so much conventional wisdom about women in politics that it is often hard to wade through what’s true and what’s simply taken as truth but is actually a baseless, outdated stereotype.  Part of the problem, at least at the national level, is that there just isn’t enough information to go on because only a handful of women have run for president – 13 women to be exact, dating back to 1872. The entire GOP field will probably be about that size come 2016, but I digress.

Fewer than one in five members of Congress in the US is a woman -- and that's actually a record high.

But one place where women are faring better is in state legislatures. Across the nation, nearly one-quarter (24.2 percent) of all state legislators are women, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.