The United States has never had more women in Congress than it does now. As of last week, when the 116th Congress was sworn in, 23.7 percent of the 535 members of Congress are women — about a quarter of the Senate and 23.4 percent of the House of Representatives.
While that's an all-time high for the United States, it's still far from representative: The U.S. Census Bureau says 51.6 percent of voting-age Americans are women. And on the world stage, many countries have much higher proportions of female lawmakers in their legislatures.
According to recent data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the country with the highest percentage of female lawmakers is Rwanda, where the lower house of Parliament is 61.