One reason we might care about women in government is if we think they will govern differently — if we think different laws will get passed or certain topics discussed at greater length.

There is research that shows this to be true: One paper from Swers at Georgetown found that female legislators consistently co-sponsor more bills related to women’s health than their male counterparts.

Liberal female legislators, Swers found, co-sponsored an average of 5.3 more women’s health bills than their liberal male colleagues. And conservative women sponsor an average of 2.8 more women’s health bills than their conservative male colleagues.

But perhaps a more fundamental reason to care about women’s representation is that having more women in government changes how society thinks about all women — and how young women think about themselves.

“If we care about taking advantage of all the skills and diversity of perspectives in our population, then we should care about seeing both parties nominate and elect more women,” says Christina Wolbrecht, a political scientist at Notre Dame University.

Wolbrecht’s work has found that adolescent girls are more likely to indicate an interest in running for office during years when there is lots of media coverage of women in politics.

Another one of Wolbrecht’s studies looked at 23 developed countries with varied levels of women in government. It found that in the countries with more female legislators, young women were more likely to participate in politics and have political discussions, and that young women expressed a greater interest in becoming politically active in the future.

Or consider an influential study published in 2012 in the journal Science, which looked at what happened when India randomly assigned some political positions to women.

In villages assigned to have female “pradhans” — essentially city council chiefs — parents became more aspirational in what they expected of their daughters.

The fraction of parents who believed that a daughter’s occupation (but not a son’s) should be determined by her in-laws declined from 76 percent to 65 percent. Adolescent girls in those areas became less likely to want to be housewives, too — and the gap in educational attainment of young boys and girls completely closed.

All of this research shows that it can matter hugely when we see someone like ourselves in a position of power. It shows: You can do this, too.

But right now, many women don’t get this message. This is especially true for women of color, who make up about 20 percent of the population now and are expected to rise to about 27 percent in 2050. But currently they make up only 6 percent of Congress. Only one African-American woman — Carol Moseley Braun, who represented Illinois in the 1990s — has ever served as a senator. And right now, only one woman of color serves in the Senate: Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono.