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.

In 1998 the United States ranked 59th in the world for women’s representation in legislature. That isn’t a good number given that we are 3rd in population. And things are not moving in the right direction. We currently rank 95th, according to Representation 2020, a non-profit organization whose mission is raise awareness about the underrepresentation of women in legislatures.

Representation 2020 — a project of FairVote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization focused on structural changes to make elections more participatory and representative at every level of government — ranked Vermont 41st out of 50 states on its gender-parity index.

Michigan has slipped from No. 8 to 11th in its gender-parity rank for electing women to public office, according to an analysis by the group Representation 2020. The index considers the number and proportion of women elected to office at the local, state and national levels.

Maryland’s score has dropped in an annual ranking by Representation 2020, a project by FairVote, a nonprofit that researches how voting systems affect participation, representation and governance, Ovetta Wiggins of the Post reports.