Hi! My name is Alisha Saxena and I am a senior at the University of California, San Diego, with a major in Political Science-Public Law and a minor in African American Studies. I am currently a Research Intern with the fabulous RepresentWomen team, working remotely from the Bay Area! Though I have been in California for eight years, I spent most of my childhood in Columbia, South Carolina- although its history isn’t great, it is definitely a beautiful place!

Even if a record number of women win next Tuesday, the U.S. will still fall short of gender parity at the national and state levels and very few states are primed to reach an “A” grade for women’s representation. 

The highlights from our 2020 Gender Parity Index include:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern accepted her landslide reelection win Saturday with a message for her country and the rest of the world: “We are living in an increasingly polarized world, a place where more and more people have lost the ability to see one another’s point of view. I hope that this election, New Zealand has shown that this is not who we are. That as a nation, we can listen and we can debate. After all, we are small to lose sight of other people’s perspective. Elections aren’t always great at bringing people together, but they also don’t need to tear one another apart.”

Ardern, the 40-year-old leader of New Zealand’s social democratic Labour Party, did not explicitly mention the highest-profile election of this fall. But it was hard not to recognize in her victory speech a nod to voters in the United States, especially when she said, “This has not been an ordinary election and it’s not an ordinary time. It’s been full of uncertainty and anxiety. And we set out to be an antidote to that.

By Fatma Tawfik

“OECD Arrivals: Victoire Tomegah-Dogbe, Directrice de Cabinet Togo” by OECD / Victor Tonelli is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

This past month,Victoire Tomegah Dogbé made history becoming the first woman Prime Minister of Togo. President Faure Gnassingbe appointed Victoire Tomegah Dogbé to the position following the resignation of the previous Prime Minister Komi Selom Klassou, who served in this position since 2015; Dogbé is also the first woman to serve in that office in the history of West Africa.

Emmanuelle Charpentier, left, and Jennifer Doudna may have made the most important biological advance since the discovery of the structure of DNA.Credit...Miguel Riopa/Agence France-Presse

Which presidential campaign produced the first nationally televised debate? The typical answer to that question is 1960, Kennedy v. Nixon. In fact, the first televised debate occurred four years earlier, when Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson challenged incumbent Republican president Dwight Eisenhower—but those two men did not appear in the debate. Instead, on November 4, 1956, two surrogates debated the issues on network television: for the Democrats, former First Lady and party icon Eleanor Roosevelt; for the Republicans, the senior senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith. That’s right—the first televised presidential debate featured two women.

By 1956 Margaret Chase Smith was in her second term in the Senate and had known Eleanor Roosevelt for two decades. “I respected and admired Mrs. Roosevelt for her intelligence and active leadership,” wrote Smith in her autobiography. Smith had been a frequent visitor to the Roosevelt White House and had appeared on the First Lady’s radio program. They both published a daily newspaper column. By 1956 both women routinely appeared on lists of America’s most admired women.