I’m about to type words I never thought I would: women owe Donald Trump a big thank you. And no that’s not sarcasm.

While media this election cycle devoted an inordinate amount of coverage to male candidates deemed rising stars within the Democratic party, such as Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke and African American Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, lesser-known women candidates were actually emerging as the real stars of the 2018 election.

This never would have happened without the current president. Though 1992 has previously been dubbed the year of the woman in American politics, because of the record number of women who were elected (47 to the House and four to the Senate that year) the gains made by women in this year’s midterms have already broken records. According to the Washington Post, women have never comprised more than 20% of the 535 seats in the House. But that will now change.

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As I write this, not every race has been called, and yet women have already shattered a multitude of glass ceilings, among them:

- Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico became the first Native American women elected to Congress.

- Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota became the first Muslim women elected to Congress.

- Ayanna Pressley became the first black woman elected to Congress in Massachusetts.

But there are countless other women, from attorneys to veterans, who also won congressional races tonight. While some will draw easy comparisons between 2018 and 1992, for me the real comparison is between the years just before both elections.

It was widely reported that a record number of women were inspired to run in 1992 due in large part to the confirmation hearings of future supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas and what they saw as an unfair system controlled by men (the Senate judiciary committee) having free rein to humiliate a woman, Thomas’s accuser Anita Hill, because there were no women there to provide checks and balances.

The years leading up to this election almost make the Thomas/Hill hearings look quaint by comparison. From a sitting president who has previously bragged about committing sexual assault, to a supreme court nominee not just accused of sexual harassment like Thomas was, but actual assault, 2018 became the year of the woman, in large part because women felt under siege. Had Donald Trump not won the presidency, had it been Hillary Clinton or even a decent man like John Kasich, it is quite possible fewer women would have run for office this year.

A marketing professor once told me that the primary ways to motivate people are through the promise of pleasure or the fear of pain, and fear is often more convincing. While I wish a lot of women ran for office because they grew up being made to believe that they have a right to power, just as much as plenty of men grow up believing they do, the truth is a lot of women ran this year because they feared for their daughters. They didn’t want them growing up in a country in which sexual assault is normalized by male leaders, or one in which their daughters face a committee full of men if she ever finds herself testifying in the same seat as Anita Hill or Dr Christine Blasey Ford.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Katherine Clark during the Democratic election night celebration in Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

While Hillary Clinton certainly inspired a lot of girls and women with her close calls at winning the White House, Donald Trump managed to do something even more important. He reminded women, each and every day on television and Twitter, that it’s not enough to care about the presidency. You have to care about who’s filling the seats that provide checks and balances for the president. That includes members of Congress and even statewide candidates, since those laws have an extraordinary impact on local communities and often provide checks and balances for the federal government, such as on policies like immigration.

But the other takeaway of this historic year of the woman is this: as usual women were underestimated, and not only by Donald Trump.

As a native of Texas, I have plenty of Beto O’Rourke fans among my family and friends, and consider him a gifted politician. Andrew Gillum, who was seeking to make history as the first black governor of Florida, became a national media darling like O’Rourke. Both generated streams of flattering press coverage, for good reason. But both lost their races. Meanwhile, there were so many incredible women who were not just longshots, but real shot candidates with incredible stories and backgrounds of their owns. A number of them won. But I can’t help but wonder how many more in close races, might have had a chance had they been given a larger piece of the media pie. We all know, media coverage begets all sorts of things, from donations to volunteers to momentum. As we learned from Trump’s victory, just by determining who to cover and how often, media can shape the outcome of races.

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As a woman, and particularly a woman of color, I can’t help but celebrate the outcome of this year’s midterms, although not as much as I wish I could. Some will call this another year of the woman, but it’s not. It’s really the year of the Democratic woman. With only a few exceptions, most of the female candidates running this year were Democrats.

The truth is if women ever want to achieve true parity in politics, pay and other domains, we need a diverse coalition of women working together to make it happen, and I don’t just mean diverse in terms of race and ethnicity. So while I certainly applaud the progress women made tonight, we still have a long way to go.

I’m looking forward to the day when we no longer need to use the term year of the woman ‎because women have begun to claim their power every year, from the state house to the White House.