Treating women equally is a double-edged sword preserving the status quo!

Why don't people take the cause of electing MORE women more seriously and with more passion? Is it only because people don't know the facts of the matter and how bad things really are, OR is it an internalized double-edged belief that prevents us from addressing a gross injustice to move forward?

Some, for both noble and ignoble reasons, thinks that the US is such a great democracy how can there possibly really be discrimination? We treat women equally, and that includes not addressing the fact that they are not really equal. Let me repeat that it includes not addressing the fact that we are not really equal -- which could explain why the media refuses to talk about the substance of the issue, even though one could suspect that it's not always just about being fair and balanced.

(Furthermore, it must be mostly about women themselves. Do they really want to be elected leaders? Let's analyze all that stuff to a fair-thee-well, and focus on the obvious differences between genders as impediments. How interesting -- and while we dwell on all that, systemic reasons get buried under the back burner...next time, next year, next lifetime...)

And women want to feel equal and consider themselves equal -- and so definitely don't want to talk about the inequities or dwell on them lest they feel in adequate and get treated as something less. Understandable, maybe -- but denial just the same.

And so by rationalizing or dreaming away the reality, we together preserve the status quo if not actually idealize it.

What will it take to have a meeting of the minds and acceptance of the fact that women are for all intents and purposes second-class citizens? It's a bitter pill to swallow maybe -- but until we do, both teams will continue to play political games with the concept of equal representation. And we will continue to trumpet the success of perilously few, while the rate of improving the numbers continues to grows at an unacceptable rate.

Fifty-one percent of all Americans hold a measely 15.2% of the seats in Congress -- there is nothing else to say.