Trump's victory over Hillary Clinton didn't just launch the Women's March; it set off an avalanche of Democratic women running for Congress, many of them first-time candidates, ranging from former Navy helicopter pilots to former CIA officers. Of the 254 non-incumbent Democratic nominees for the House, an unheard-of 50 percent are women, compared to 18 percent of Republicans.

Currently, there are 61 female Democrats and 23 female Republicans serving in the House. But after November, Democrats could expand their ranks of women by more than a third. Meanwhile, the GOP's ranks could shrink by up to a third.

Democratic primary voters have made clear they feel the best way to send a message to Trump is to send a woman to Congress: In Democratic House primaries featuring at least one man, one woman and no incumbent on the ballot, a female candidate has won 69 percent of the time. In the same situations on the GOP side, a female candidate has won just 35 percent of the time.

A pair of insurgent female progressives, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, defeated 20-year Democratic incumbents, Reps. Joe Crowley (NY-14) and Mike Capuano (MA-07), in highly symbolic primaries that made national headlines.

But Pennsylvania stands out as the state where Democratic women are poised to gain the most. In February, the state's top court ordered a new congressional map that prompted multiple GOP retirements and could help elect a quartet of Democratic women from the Philadelphia suburbs: Madeleine Dean (PA-04), Mary Gay Scanlon (PA-05), Chrissy Houlahan (PA-06) and Susan Wild (PA-07).

Texas could see the next-biggest surge: In March, Veronica Escobar (TX-16) and Sylvia Garcia (TX-29) won their primaries for safely Democratic open seats and are virtually guaranteed to become the first Latinas elected from the Lone Star State. Four other states have strong potential to add two Democratic women each: Florida, Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia.

Republicans, whose primaries have been defined much more by candidates' degree of loyalty to Trump, are headed in the opposite direction. Of the 23 GOP women in the House, four chose to run for another office this year and two are retiring. In Tennessee alone, Reps. Diane Black (TN-06) and Marsha Blackburn (TN-07) chose to run statewide and are all but certain to be succeeded by GOP men.

Of the remaining 17 GOP women in the House, three are at severe risk of losing re-election this fall: Reps. Mimi Walters (CA-45), Claudia Tenney (NY-22), Barbara Comstock (VA-10). An additional four are only slight favorites in their races. Meanwhile, there are only three states where House GOP women are poised to add to their ranks: New Mexico, South Carolina and West Virginia. 

The House's burgeoning gender gap isn't the only demographic chasm on display in 2018; the parties are diverging along racial lines as well.

At the moment, 86 percent of House Republicans are white men, compared to 41 percent of House Democrats.

The race-by-race analysis suggests that could widen to 87 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of Democrats — a massive 50-point divide — come 2019. That would put Republicans increasingly at odds with the country, considering that white males now comprise just 31 percent of America's population.

David Wasserman, House editor for The Cook Political Report, is an NBC News contributor and senior analyst with the NBC Election Unit.

If these projections are on target and there are indeed 100 women elected to the US House this November, that would translate into women comprising 22.9% of the House which puts the US at about 77th - right between Singapore and the Republic of Moldova. Institutional reforms like recruitment targets & ranked choice voting are a terrific complement to the great work so many of you are doing to prepare individual women to run.

Speaking of institutional reforms, The Business Post of Ireland ran a piece about the record numbers of women running which is firmly behind a paywall but I have thoughtfully included the full text here that includes my attempt to put the unusual number of open seats in perspective:

‘Or, should I say: congresswoman! Let’s get that much out of the way right now,” bellowed the jubilant head of the postal workers’ union. “Congresswoman!” cried a community activist. “I like the way that sounds.”

“Congresswoman?” said the executive director of a union representing non-profit social service, home care and childcare employees. “God bless you and thank you.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, hair resting behind her shoulders, looked up from the notes she was furiously taking and smiled each time the term was used. On August 7 roughly 200 people had edged their way into a community hall in the Bronx, New York City’s northernmost borough, to listen to her speak.

The 28-year-old listened, first, for the best part of an hour, to a line of environmentalists, car washers, teachers and health care campaigners. When her turn finally came, Ocasio-Cortez said firmly: “I’m so thrilled and honoured by folks calling me ‘congresswoman’. But I am not ‘congresswoman’ yet.”

In her district’s Democratic primary at the end of June, Ocasio-Cortez defeated the incumbent, Joseph Crowley, a man twice her age and the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. News of the upset was carried around the world. In November, she may become the youngest-ever woman elected to Congress. The Bronx, then, will have plenty to talk about.

But neither the excitement surrounding Ocasio-Cortez’s elevation nor the novelty of her candidacy is an anomaly in 2018. In the US this year, a record-breaking number of women – more than 500 –are running for office.

Earlier this year, in Lebanon’s first parliamentary elections since 2009, there were 113 women registered as candidates. Last time round, there were just 12.

Spain now has a majority-female cabinet. France is 50-50. The Mexican-president elect has stated that he wants women to hold eight posts in his 16-member cabinet come December (already, the percentage of women in office in Mexico is in the very high forties, a circumstance that was legislatively induced). Last year, 208 women MPs were elected to the House of Commons, a record high of 32 per cent.

In 1990, an opponent criticised then-prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto, for “going for” a second child while in office. “It is clear that the prime minister of Pakistan wants it all: motherhood, domesticity, glamour,” sniffed Syeda Abida Hussain. “She is even seeking more power than she has. Such a person in an ordinary context would be described as greedy.”

On August 2, prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern – hailed by some as being the second ever woman to do as Bhutto did – returned to work six weeks after giving birth to her first child.

Ardern returns with the option of breastfeeding her daughter in New Zealand’s ‘baby-friendly’ chamber and has tweaked the rules to allow children join their parents in the parliamentary swimming pool. “I’m not the first woman to multi-task,” she said, laughing, when she announced her pregnancy. At 38, Ardern is also the youngest female head of government in the world.

Ocasio-Cortez may not yet be a congresswoman. But to the supporters gathered anxiously last week to see her, some on folding chairs, many more standing towards the back of the hall, all perspiring heavily in the August fug, she seemed close enough.

What is the source of the momentum that seems to be building behind women with ambitions to enter politics, and to succeed once there? “This is not just a curiosity. It’s not an interesting number or statistic. It’s historic,” Anna Eshoo, a democratic representative from California, told Politico in March. “This year a lot of unspoken but tough walls have come tumbling down.”

The recent American experience is certainly instructive. The years-long campaigning by organisations like Black Lives Matter. The sprawl of the #MeToo movement. Reproductive rights. Increasingly urgent protests against family separation and unequal pay. All of these efforts, many of them in response to measures mooted or implemented by the Trump administration, have been led, or brought to prominence, by women.

The developments are to be welcomed, but with the right amount of scrutiny, according to Cynthia Richie Terrell, the founder and director of RepresentWomen, a nonpartisan organisation that works to advance female representation in appointed and elected office.

“I would say this year definitely feels different,” she says. “But there’s a caveat.” Terrell used as an explanatory crutch the ‘excalibur’ scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!”).

“Like the handing out of swords, resignation by men due to predatory sexual behaviour and other scandals, leaving openings for women, cannot be the basis of our revolution,” she says with a small laugh.

Terrell is nonetheless heartened by what she hopes is a “normalisation” of women’s power and women’s candidacies. She says that for her and many of her peers the goal was not to have one woman running, even if she has star qualities, but to have two, three, multiple women running against each other.

“So voters can choose,” Terrell says. “So the candidate is not just the woman, it’s the best candidate. It can be hard to see that though, a true blossoming of female representation. It’s sobering to look into the depth of underrepresentation of women, the depth of American exceptionalism, and our isolation from the rest of the world where new standards are being met.”

The US ranks behind 200 countries, globally, and it’s not because of the ambition or education of American women, says Terrell, but because of the system, and the lack of quotas, or even targets, as well as enduring structural barricades to entry. While applauding enthusiasm and candidacy she said it was a distraction from the structural reform necessary for consistent and lasting change.

“We’re behind countries that are far less economically advanced, and, again, it’s not that the women are different. It’s that the systems are different. It’s very important to work collaboratively and in solidarity with those who are running and winning, but at the same time ‘the year of the woman’ is a silly catchphrase when we need this to be the century of women,” Terrell says.

In a 2014 body of research carried out by Columbia University (eventually summarised under the headline, When Women Rule, Nations Prosper), it was found that a woman in the top national leadership position was correlated with a 6.8 per cent greater increase in GDP growth.

The Columbia research emphasises women’s “participatory, democratic style” and acknowledges an appetite – the voter’s tendency to better trust women in tricky interpersonal or emotional situations.

The summary reads: “A mere 15 per cent of parliamentary representatives around the world are women — a reflection that for all the benefits democracy may bestow upon nations, it has not yet fully delivered on social equity. There are hints of change: women in top national leadership positions — president or prime minister — have more than quadrupled between 1950 and 2004, from four to 18. Recently, women have been elected in every corner of the globe, including Chile, Germany, Liberia, and South Korea.”

Four years on, the number of incumbent female heads of state and government is 26. So far this year, Romania, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados have all installed women at the top for the first time in history.

A celebrated 2012 analysis by the consultancy firm McKinsey suggested that private profit is also easier achieved by diverse and inclusive boards. Terrell and her colleagues are having conversations about other walks of life in which productivity and non-monetary dividends can be similarly reached, as in judicial appointments. “Judicial outcomes are actually more important than legislative outcomes,” she says.

Terrell’s organisation, RepresentWomen, can express concerns about the category of outcome, but not about the substance or the politics. “Pushing for pro-choice, democratic women is not actually parity,” she says. “We can only achieve parity when indigenous women, Republican women, and lower-income women all have representation.”

It is incorrect, in the political climate of panic over isolationism, nationalism and “resistance” against other populist forces, to look at voguish social democrats with liberal agendas like Ocasio-Cortez or progressive feminists like Ardern and take their progress as a given for women on all sides of the political spectrum.

To take the US as an example: according to the Center for American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University, of 408 women running for the House of Representatives, 305 are Democrats and 103 are Republicans. A rising tide, if it really is rising, lifts all boats, not just left-wing challengers.

Clare Malone, politics writer with the US news site Five Thirty-Eight, said in a recent podcast on the theme that Republican female politicians had “a very fair beef about the way they are talked about in the press by their opponents”. Ads are often sexist, demeaning, and nicknames get bandied around, Malone observed.

This makes somebody like Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, a “cult hero” for some women of the right, according to Malone, who said there was something to be said for high-profile Republican models and “polished, high-profile women on the right.” “Sarah Palin, they are not,” she said.

Election does not equate to popularity, and in any case popularity does not insulate a politician from pot-shots and abuse. In 2012, the then prime minister of Australia and the first woman to have the position, Julia Gillard, stood on the floor of parliament and took apart the “repulsive double standards” of the then leader of the opposition. The excoriating 15-minute clip is summarised on its own Wikipedia page under Misogyny Speech.

Gillard is heckled but, by the end, assumes a rare self-possession. She concludes, quietly and calmly: “The leader of the opposition should think seriously about the role of women in public life and in Australian society, because we are entitled to a better standard than this.”

After Gillard’s term, a proposed telemovie about her life was rejected “by every local network, cable broadcaster and digital streaming service”, according to the Daily Telegraph in Australia.

In order to defeat Joe Crowley as she did, Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone she sent 170,000 text messages and knocked on 120,000 doors. Her victory took everybody by surprise, at first, but soon vocal opponents from within the Democratic party and without began to circle in earnest.

At the end of the event in the Bronx, a member of Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign team pleaded with gathered reporters and members of the public to clear out of the community hall and into the summer thunderstorm developing outside.

The waiting group shifted here and there without really moving. One man accidentally dropped a handful of flyers bearing the face of another female political hopeful in New York, Sex And The City star Cynthia Nixon, who is running for governor on a platform similarly beloved of right-minded urbanites, with emphases on transportation reform, legalised marijuana, and “community over corporation”.

Those holding phones and DSLRs were balanced on steps and pressed up against walls. The voice of the campaign worker eventually rose to an exasperated pitch. “No more questions! No more photos! And no more selfies!” she shouted. “I honestly don’t understand what more you want from her.”