It’s tempting to be really encouraged about the state of women’s representation in politics today. After all, we've seen success stories everywhere. Elise Stefanik, a Republican out of New York, earned the title of youngest congresswoman ever elected when she took office in 2014. Mia Love became the first black Republican woman to be elected to Congress when she won in Utah that same year. In fact, all over the country, 2014 was hailed as a “Year of Women.”

As Molly Rockett recently observed, the percentage of women in American state legislatures has stalled at 25% for nearly a decade since making impressive gains in the 1960s and 1970s.

Representation 2020 works to raise awareness of the underrepresentation of women in elected office, to strengthen coalitions in support of equitable women’s representation, and to highlight the often-overlooked structural barriers to achieving gender parity in American elections.

Women are more than half of the American population, and yet they only hold a fifth of seats in Congress, a quarter of state legislative seats, and are only one in ten state governors.  There are at least four reasons why we should care about the dismal state of women’s representation in American today and actively pursue gender parity in elected office.

Women make up 50.8% of the population in the United States, but only 19% of Congress. Do we still live in a representative democracy if women are not being equally represented? It is easy to advertise these statistics and demand change, but if you have no actual plan to achieve gender parity, then your quest may be in vain. Representation 2020 seeks to present a plan with reasonable goals in order to “raise awareness of the under-representation of women in elected office, to strengthen coalitions that are supportive of measures to increase women's representation, and to highlight the often overlooked structural barriers to achieving gender parity in American elections.” Before we explain how exactly Representation 2020 seeks to raise awareness and make these landmark changes, let’s first explain why we need groups like this. 

The top 5 states in Representation 2020’s 2015 Gender Parity Index (GPI)  includes 4 democratic-leaning states and Arizona. FairVote conducted an analysis to determine the common links between states with high GPI scores. Only one measure was highly correlated with a state’s gender parity score: the proportion of people in a state who describe themselves as somewhat or very religious.  The lower the proportion within a state, the higher the state’s GPI.

Women hold 24.3 percent of seats in state legislatures throughout the United States. This percentage is barely up from 24.2 percent of seats before the 2014 election, inching state legislatures only slightly closer to gender parity. If we continue at this snail’s pace, we will wait centuries to reach gender parity. However, there are simple, tried, tested and proven effective structural changes that American state legislatures can adopt to speed up progress to gender parity: multi-winner districts.     

The United States currently ranks 94th out of 189 countries for the representation of women in the lower house.  If the United States continues at the current rate, it will take generations to reach gender parity. Other nations, like Finland and Denmark are striding much more quickly toward gender parity in elected office. In part, our slow progress toward gender parity is due to structural barriers that inhibit women’s recruitment, election and ability to serve. The United States must reform its single-winner district system and engage in intentional legislative and party actions to increase the representation of women.

This week the Arizona Cardinals announced that they had hired Jen Welter to be their assistant coach during the team’s training camp and preseason. The decision makes her the first woman to hold any type of coaching position in the NFL. Welter has continuously broken barriers to women’s participation in professional sports, attaining a coaching position in February from the Texas Revolution of the Champions Indoor Football league, which made her the first woman to coach in a male professional football league. As the team’s historical decision is just the first step in the process towards gender parity in sports, one begins to consider how the representation of women fares in other fields.

After the 2014 election, the U.S. narrative of women’s representation has focused on the  gains that women have achieved this cycle. Because a record number of 104 women have entered Congress this session, media outlets tend to ignore that there is also a trend of backtracking and stagnation in states’ progress toward gender parity in elected office.

In national elected offices, women are severely under-represented. As Representation 2020 (a project of FairVote) highlights, women currently women hold only 18% of U.S. House seats. The 2014 midterm elections are right around the corner, and 160 women are running for seats in the U.S. House. Will the 2014 midterm elections bring the U.S. House closer to gender parity? Using FairVote’s Monopoly Politics 2014 Report, we projected the results for these candidates come November 4th. Here are a few of the highlights.