Congress is sexist. So says Illinois Congresswoman Cheri Bustos, a former journalist and health-care executive who in 2012 became the first woman from her district to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. As she faces reelection in November, one of her top missions is to flood Congress with women and people of color so the lawmakers drafting bills "truly reflect the makeup of America."

According to Representation2020, a program by FairVote, the United States ranks 95th in the world for the percentage of women in its national legislature — behind countries such as Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, which American political discourse conveniently labels “backwards” while praising the U.S. and other Western countries as “progressive.” The numbers further highlight this hypocrisy.

Others have pointed to structural issues in the U.S. election process as a potential answer. Cynthia Terrell, founder and chair of Representation2020, which seeks to raise awareness about issues of women in politics, said that factors such as voting systems and recruiting practices could keep women out of politics.

The United States is also well behind many nations, like Great Britain and Germany, by never electing a woman into executive office. Currently women make up approximately 51% of the population of the United States (Representation 2020). Despite these statistics, women only comprise 18% of Congress, 24% of State Legislators, and 10% of Governors (Representation 2020).

Today there are 20 female United States senators, according to Fair Vote. Exactly none of them are African-American women. Only 27 states have ever sent a woman to the Senate. Currently, only 17 states have a woman as a senator—including three: Washington, New Hampshire and California, that have two women serving in the Senate.

In the end, voting for women, it turns out, isn’t enough. (Not that it isn’t exhilarating, as well as important.) True gender parity won’t be reached by those means alone, because most of the women who should be running the world will never see their names at the ballot box.

The online platform ‘Representation 2020. A Century from Suffrage to Parity’ works to raise awareness of the under-representation of women in elected office, to strengthen coalitions supportive of measures to increase women's representation, and to highlight the often overlooked structural barriers to achieving gender parity in American elections.

Rhode Island is making strides in increasing the number of women in elected office, according to Representation 2020, a Maryland-based nonprofit that advocates for women in elected positions. A new study ranks Rhode Island 16th out of the 50 states in terms of "gender parity in elected office." Last year, Rhode Island ranked 31st.