At the 2017 World Economic Forum on Africa, participants studied the quality of life for women among various African cultures, as well as compared to cultures around the world. The question posed was, “How difficult is it to be a woman here?”

Now that’s an interesting question. To arrive at some answers, the forum tracked a number of variables across 144 countries: access to electricity and transportation, life expectancy and health care, participation in the labor force, income and political equality (World Economic Forum, 2/5/2017).

Can you guess which country does not show up in the top ten for gender equality? That’s right. The United States falls short on all the important means of quantifying the gender gap. It is harder to be a woman here, in terms of political clout and workforce participation, than it is to be a woman in Rwanda or Bolivia or Iceland.

The United States is, by the way, the only developed country in the world that does not make paid maternity leave mandatory for employers. We also have the worst maternal death rate in the developed world.

A few years ago, The Nation published an article estimating that at the current rate of progress, it would take 500 years for women in this country to achieve equal representation in politics (The Nation, 3/7/2014). Listening to speeches and ads by some of the entrenched politicians who are up for re-election this year, it became clear to me that they speak a common language, one invested tiny little incremental steps toward a goal, even if the results would logically take 500 years.

We are currently witnessing a far-reaching effort to change that mind set. Since the 2017 Women’s March to protest Trump’s election, over 26,000 women have contacted Emily’s List for advice about running for office. Nearly 80 have launched campaigns for governor (Time, 1/18/2018). Nevertheless, wins by women in primaries so far show that progress towards gender equality in politics remains several elections away.

Rwanda suffered through the slaughter of over 800,000 people in the 1990’s, during the genocide. Survivors were primarily female, and the labor force became primarily female as a result. As the country began to recover, Rwanda enacted female-friendly laws, such as three-months paid maternity leave, to keep women in the work force. The country also legislated quotas for female participation in governance, stipulating that at least 30% of the parliament had to be female. (In the United States congress, we have been hovering around 20% females).

More than half of the world’s countries now have legal or voluntary gender quotas as a way to put women on a fast track to equal participation in governance (Parliament of Australia, 14/11/2013). If we tried that here, the predictable outcry would be, “Unfair!” “Reverse discrimination!”

Instead, we have produced a bumper crop of female candidates this year who are described as having bold visions. That means they are proposing ideas that will change things rapidly, not in 500 years. Many are progressives who are running in order to address systemic injustice, who speak candidly about the needs of the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten in our society.

Recent history shows that this is what women in politics do: they make life more humane, more inclusive, more egalitarian for everyone (The Guardian, 7/12/2017). The scattered election of women we’ve seen so far hasn’t been able to achieve that. We need a critical mass of women elected to congress.

After Iceland elected a female president in 1980, female participation in politics skyrocketed. Last year Iceland was ranked the most gender equal country in the world for the ninth time. It was also recently named as the world’s best place for working women (The Guardian, 7/12/2017).

(“Incidentally, a Stanford University study also showed that female Congress members simply get more stuff done – passing, on average, twice as many bills as male legislators in one analyzed session of Congress.”) The Guardian, 7/12/2017

Ayanna Pressley is one of those hard-working, bold vision people. She just won a congressional seat from a 10-term congressman in Massachusetts. Prior to her run for national office, she was the first woman of color elected to the Boston City Council, and boy did she get work done!

As a candidate, she spoke about the city needing to do more for girls, to uplift especially black and brown girls. During her 9 years on the council, she created the Committee on Healthy Women, Families, and Communities to spotlight stable families, reduce violence and poverty, and promote women’s issues (City of Boston.gov). She created a sex education program that was adopted city-wide. She also worked with multiple constituents, including adolescent minorities, to change the specific discipline practices black and brown girls encounter in Boston city schools (YW Boston, 8/15/2018).

The elder politicians who have been in office for years do not seem to understand this way of working. We the people face horrendous difficulties trying to manage our ordinary lives. More and more of us are getting poorer and poorer: in wealth, in health and in spirit. Going slowly has cost us dearly.

Right now we are looking for candidates who have lived alongside of us, if you will – who have been single mothers, who have been down to their last dollar week after week, who have butted against gender expectations and racial profiling time and time again, who are putting kids through college with massive loans, who have inadequate health insurance, who grew up witnessing street violence, who have children with special needs, and so on and so on. We need people with experience in living far more than we need people with experience in that privileged, male, political world.

As Ayanna Pressley said, “The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.” Perhaps this election will bring that living wisdom to congress.