There are more female lawmakers than ever, but America is still below the world average

Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Adam Taylor.

As of Jan. 3, when the 116th Congress was sworn in, 23.7 percent of the 535 members of Congress are women — roughly a quarter of the Senate and 23.4 percent of the House of Representatives.

That’s an all-time high for the United States, but it’s still far from representative. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 51.6 percent of voting-age Americans are women. And on the world stage, many countries have much higher proportions of female lawmakers in their legislatures.

Recent data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union reveals that the country with the highest percentage of female lawmakers is Rwanda, where the lower house of parliament is currently 61.3 percent female. It is followed by two Latin American countries: Cuba, where the lower house is 53.2 percent female and Bolivia, where it’s 53.1 percent female. The United States' neighbor, Mexico, is next on the list with 48.2 percent.

The United States also lags behind other major Western democracies, including France (39.6 percent), Britain (32 percent) and Germany (30.7 percent). It would sit in 74th place in the latest IPU rankings, sandwiched between Bulgaria and Cabo Verde.

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Of course, these are all countries with different political systems. Cuba and China, for example, don’t meet many people’s definitions of a democracy. The United States, meanwhile, is quite unusual in that the two chambers of its national legislature are roughly equal in stature (and at this point, roughly equal in gender equality).

But still, in comparison, the United States' recent gains in female representation look rather meager compared to those in other nations in the past decade and a half. In some of these countries, legislation was passed to encourage female parliament members. Rwanda, for example, implemented a constitution in 2003 that called for a 30 percent female quota in the country’s legislative bodies. The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance says more than half of all countries now apply some sort of gender quota to their parliaments.

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There is a bright spot for the United States, however. With Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) returning to her position as speaker of the House, the country is one of a small minority of nations where women lead a legislature — according to the IPU, 81 percent of the world’s parliaments were led by a man as of last year.