In a few years, when you pull cash out of the ATM, you may end up looking at a woman's face.

Almost a year ago, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that a woman would appear on the $10 bill. But the popularity of the musical Hamilton, and renewed interest in him, complicated matters. So now, rumors are circulating that Lew will announce that Hamilton will stay on the $10, a woman will appear on the $20, and Andrew Jackson, whose face currently occupies the front of the $20 note, will move to the back. Replacing him on the front, reportedly, will be Harriet Tubman, who won the Women on 20s online poll last spring.

It's hard to imagine a more fitting choice: A woman born into slavery who shepherded so many enslaved people to freedom through her Underground Railroad taking the place of a mass murderer, a genocidal man who worked as a slave trader and went on to force tens of thousands of Native Americans off their land through the Indian Removal Act, many of them dying on the Trail of Tears. If there were ever a guy to kick off the currency, Jackson is it.

And what a woman to take that spot. Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in her 20s, fleeing Maryland for Philadelphia—and immediately returning to smuggle her family north. She went back down to the South again and again, bringing more slaves north, even helping to ferry people to Canada when the Fugitive Slave Law left them vulnerable even in Northern states. Tubman famously "never lost a passenger" on her Underground Railroad, and her work earned her the nickname "Moses." She started out as a nurse in the Union Army before becoming a spy and an armed scout—she freed at least 700 enslaved people in the Combahee River Raid as the first woman in the war to lead an armed expedition. After the war, she was also an activist for women's voting rights.

Tubman's service to her nation, though, went under-recognized in her lifetime, and she lived in a state of financial stress. The standard war veteran pension at the time was $25 a month; after the death of her second husband, Tubman was granted $8 a month. After a year of fighting, Congress gave her a little bit more: $20.

That her face could be on that bill sends a strong message: In a country where little matters more than money, women matter too. It would be nice if we could put the face of a female president on the bill, but we've never had one of those. And it would be nice if we could say that the kind of gender discrimination Tubman faced when she was given an $8 pension and then a $20 one was a thing of the past, but still, women make a fraction of what men do—and black women make even less.

We remain a country in which women are in many cases second-class citizens, facing unequal treatment, left largely out of leadership positions, and marginalized in politics. For every woman in Congress, there are four men. A woman just may win the presidency this year, but she will be the first in 200 years.

A woman on the $20 bill won't fix any of this. But the way boys understand what it means to be men and girls understand what it means to be women is through a complex interplay of adults modeling behavior, cultural norms, and symbolism. When our representations of leadership and patriotism are all white men, it sends a message that leadership and patriotism are male things. That message can't be countered only with the promise that girls can be anything they want to be, contrary to the weight of the evidence.

Harriet Tubman on the $20 makes clear that women have shaped this country for the better and have made invaluable contributions — contributions they made despite being largely barred from political participation. That she will replace a man who engineered a genocide of this county's native population could not be more appropriate or more reflective of how much times may have changed.

Assuming, that is, that times actually have changed and it happens. There's no confirmation yet from the Treasury Department, and it seems that even if Tubman (or any woman) replaces Jackson on the $20, it'll be 14 years until any of us actually see her face in green. That's more than three times as long as the Civil War and comes after a century of women waiting to see a female face on a bill.

Women have waited long enough, and Americans have had to stare at Andrew Jackson's face coming out of the ATM for far too long. In a few years, cash may be obsolete and we'll all be paying with cards or our phones or some sort of retina scanner hooked directly to our Bitcoin stash. Sometime before that, it would be nice to open my wallet and see a few Tubmans inside.

Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io