17 percent

This was the figure I heard on Up With Chris Hayes yesterday. Only 17 percent of US senators and 16.8 percent of the House members are women. The numbers among academics, law, and business stack professionals up similarly, according to Leslie Bennet's article in The Daily Beast, Women and the Leadership Gap :

"From politics and business to academia, law and religion, the allocation of power remains stunningly lopsided. “Over half of college graduates but less than a quarter of full professors and a fifth of college presidents are female,” reported Deborah Rhode and Barbara Kellerman in their book Women and Leadership. 'In management, women account for about a third of M.B.A. classes, but only 2 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, 6 percent of top earners, 8 percent of top leadership positions, and 16 percent of board directors and corporate officers. In law, women constitute about half of new entrants to the profession, but less than a fifth of law firm partners, federal judges, law school deans, and Fortune 500 general counsels. Half the students in divinity school are women, but they account for only 3 percent of the pastors of large congregations in protestant churches that have been ordaining women for decades.'"

The entertainment industry doesn't fair much better:

"Among this year’s Academy Award nominations, 98 percent were given to movies directed by men, 84 percent went to movies written by men, and 70 percent to movies starring men. In the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as elsewhere in American society, the important decisions continue to be made by men: 77 percent of Oscar voters are male."

Why bring this up now when for years any reasonable person could conclude that yes, there is a definite lack of parity in leadership positions across the board, from politics to making movies?  Watching a roomful of older, white men discuss contraception, some of them not even knowing how it works, brought a lot of this stuff back into the open. Plus there's a myth, particularly among younger people, that feminism, when viewed with enough historical distance, solved all that, right? Wrong.