President-elect Donald Trump gives his acceptance speech in New York, Nov. 9, 2016. Press Association / Mary Altaffer
In 2015, there were 96 countries in the world with a higher percentage of women elected to lower or single houses of parliament than the United States. This is the number that I have felt missing in the many articles written to explain Hillary Clinton’s surprising loss to Donald Trump.
Here is another one that I have not found either: in the last five decades, almost half of 142 nations studied by the World Economic Forum have had a female head of government or an elected head of state. Several countries have now had multiple women leaders. The United States is of course not one of them, even though it is one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies and has held 57 democratic elections for president, a higher number than most countries in the world.
