Shakes here...
It's a record year for women in the House of Representatives. We've got the first ever female Speaker, and a record-setting 71 female representatives, bringing us to an astounding 16% share. That puts us at #66 on the Inter-Parliamentary Union's list of 190 countries "classified by descending order of the percentage of women in the lower or single House," outranked by China, North Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as some notable examples, for reasons I imagine are self-evident.
An "extensive survey of women in professions that produce many lawmakers: education, business and the law" done by political science professors Richard Fox and Jennifer Lawless found, in part, that women who are asked to run are "just as likely as men to do it," but also that "women are less likely than men to be asked to run for office by party leaders and other officials." Such conclusions certainly seem to be bolstered by Ryan Lizza's The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat in today's New York Times.