United States: Women as Voters and Politicians

1. In the 2014 U.S. elections, 43% of women voted – a rate more than two percentage points greater than men.

2. More than half of all voters in the 2012 presidential election were women.

3. Elections aside, there are 162 million women in the United States – five million more than men.

4. Women make up a fifth of all members of the two houses of the U.S. Congress.

5. Women also hold nearly one in five mayors’ offices of the 100 largest U.S. cities.

6. Hillary Clinton is expected to become the first female nominee for president on a major party ticket later this summer.

7. Women have already led nine of the 20 most populous countries in the world.

8. The United States gave women the right to vote nationwide in 1920. That was actually quite late among leading democracies.

9. The United States was only about the 20th of the 34 modern-day OECD countries to grant women the right to vote in national elections.

10. The first advanced democracy to adopt female suffrage was New Zealand in 1893.

Sources: Center for American Women and Politics, Inter-Parliamentary Union, Center for American Progress, The Globalist Research Center