The United States has entered an age of complacency when it comes to women’s representation in public life. Just look at the numbers. Women in 2004 held 25.7 percent of statewide executive elective offices and hold 22.6 percent of those offices today — a 3.1 point decline from 10 years ago. Women held 13.8 percent of U.S. congressional seats in 2004. Today they hold 18.5 percent — not much of a gain for an entire decade. In the corporate world, after decades of women’s leadership programs, virtually nothing has changed in the last five years. Women held only 16.9 percent of board seats and 14.6 percent of executive officer positions in 2013 — no significant change from the year prior. In 2012 and 2013, one-tenth of Fortune 500 companies had no women on their boards, and more than 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies had no female executive officers. Women of color held only 3.2 percent of Fortune 500 board seats in 2013, down from 3.3 percent in 2012. “But wait,” you might be thinking. “Isn’t this the era of women’s rapid rise to cultural dominance and the end of men”? That’s one willfully obtuse way of looking at it. In fact, the reverse is true: Women made great strides 40 to 50 years ago, at least in terms of public perception, if not actual power. Back then a commitment to large-scale social change was seen as admirable and pragmatic rather than delusional and naive: Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and the first major-party black candidate for president of the United States, introduced a bill in 1971 that would have set aside $10 billion worth of federal funds for child care. Had it gone into effect, it would have made it possible for all American women — not just a privileged few — to opt out of being their children’s sole or primary caretakers, as men have always been able to do. Thousands more women who wanted to become lawyers or doctors or hold public office could have. A weaker version of Chisholm’s bill, sponsored by a man, eventually passed the House and Senate — only to be vetoed by then-President Richard Nixon. Imagine what this country would be like today if the kind of wide-ranging, transformative legislation, from the Equal Rights Amendment to universal child care, that Chisholm and others like her fought for in the 1960s and ’70s had come to pass. American women would have the same rights and privileges as men. We wouldn’t be begging for table scraps from powerful men; we’d have seats at the table.

Lack of representation

Antonin Scalia declared in 2011 that the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. And the sad thing is that technically, he’s right.