The idea for this panel came after the presidential election last year when many women felt a call to action. We had a fabulous roster of speakers including, Erin Villardi, founder and director of VoteRunLead; Rina Shah, political strategist and media commentator; Cynthia Richie Terrell, founder and director of Representation20/20 and co-founder of FairVote; and Tremaine S. Wright, a New York State Assemblywoman serving the 56th District in Brooklyn, NY.

Privy to a recent conversation among high-level Democratic donors following Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential loss, former state senator and gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis couldn’t help but feel shocked.

While voters and political pundits alike are still hashing out what exactly happened on November 8, there is one conclusion about the election that most cannot deny: many voters felt they didn’t have adequate choices.

While more women of color were just elected to the U.S. House and Senate than ever before, the overall number of women in Congress remains the same, the number of women governors dropped to just five and women’s share of state legislative seats is still under 25 percent. The United States now ranks 99th among nations for the representation of women, a steep decline from 44th in 1995.

Cynthia Richie Terrell, director of Representation 2020, argued that we also need systemic solutions. “Structural reforms to the recruitment process and voting systems are fueling efforts to elect more women to office in other countries,” Terrell wrote by email, pointing out that, due to the lack of such reforms, “the U.S. now ranks behind 99 other nations in terms of women’s representation” in politics.

Washington, DC — Representation2020, Common Cause and the Center for Responsive Politics have released a new report revealing the systemic disparity in funding for female candidates by PACs, individual donors and major parties. Women are underfunded to run for open seats despite that they are more likely to win open seat races than those in which they challenge an incumbent. In addition, Republican women are likely to face additional barriers and increased opposition funding.

In this post-election world where a highly qualified woman lost the presidency to a misogynist bully, and women failed to make meaningful gains nationally in the long quest for gender parity among elected officials, our elected leaders in “progressive Vermont” have much work to do to prove that women in politics in our state are valued as equals.

The United States ranks behind 95 countries in women’s representation, and we just aren’t increasing at nearly the same rate as other nations. And that, I think, should be a huge indicator to people who care about reflective representation to pay attention to what those other countries are doing and to think, wow, are there some systems approaches that we could be employing in the United States to correct that imbalance?

I’ll be honest: When I heard that battle cry from Hillary Clinton after her nomination as the first female presidential nominee of a major party, I rolled my eyes. It’s just instinct at this point. For me—and, I suspect, other non-Americans looking in—I’ve never been sure why barriers to political leadership in the United States are inherently harder, or its office is inherently higher, than similar roles in the United Kingdom, Pakistan, or Argentina. The whole “highest, hardest glass ceiling” thing rings as hollow to me as when Clinton says “America is great, because America is good.”