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It was my mom who taught me that women count.  They do count, they should count, they must count.  My mom can’t help but count.  One, two, three, four… she is always counting things.  She counts the number of chairs when she enters a room and the stairs when she climbs a staircase.  And so it made sense that when she began college at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1960 she decided she wanted to major in accounting.  My grandfather, who was himself an accountant and by all accounts a sweet, gentle and supportive man, was troubled by this.  Women, he told her, were simply not accountants.  It couldn’t be done.  That is how my mother became a history major.

I am so grateful that my history is different.  I majored in history because it is my passion, because I believe that studying history is the path to the future.  My whole life I have been told, first as a girl and now as a woman, that I can do anything.  No job, no field, no title was off-limits because of my gender.  And furthermore, thanks to the single-minded devotion and hard work of a single mother who became an accountant after all, I have been given opportunities for an education of which my grandmother could have only dreamt.  With so many opportunities and messages of affirmation and support, I had no complaint about sexism.  I have always thought that feminism was a good thing, but it was a class in women’s history that made it relevant to my life.

As I learned about the history of sexist, pseudo-scientific stereotypes and gender discrimination, I felt that my eyes were being opened.  I saw misogyny in subtle, offhand comments, and discrimination in the structures, values, and assumptions of the world around me.  The worst of it however, came when I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.  Women, she explained, were seen by society as only secondary.  Man was the neutral form of humanity; woman was simply the other, an aberration.  I hated it.  I didn’t want it to be true.  But as I walked through the halls of a women’s college I was visiting, I was struck by the rows of portraits of women.  And only women.  I wanted to rejoice in this refuge of this place of all-female learning, but instead I was saddened by how very strange those portraits seemed.  It would not have been remarkable had they all been men, but the faces of those studious, serious women were a shock to my system.  It seemed like an aberration of the norm.

I thought about Susan B. Anthony being relegated to the rarely used dollar coin, or how few women seem to find their way to the cover of Fortune or Forbes.  And I hated to admit it even to myself, but Simone de Beauvoir was right.  Even though I had always been told that I could do anything, when I pictured a CEO, I first pictured a man.  The same was true of a doctor, a police officer, a lawyer, an engineer, a priest, a senator, a professor, a Supreme Court justice, and especially a president.  It didn’t matter that I knew women could be any of these things, that I knew some who were.  Sexism in our society runs deep and is not something that can be eradicated in a generation.  But we must keep pressing forward.

My issue then, is representation.  I dream of a day when women and men serve in equal numbers in the senate, on the boards of Fortune 500 companies, and in operating rooms.  When women can pursue high-level positions in any career without being chided for neglecting their maternal duties.  When a woman’s presence is not a token of political correctness but a powerful force to restructure our country’s broken institutions.  When women are not passed over for promotions or discouraged from pursuing their dreams.  When women’s voices are a significant part of the conversation and are taken seriously.

I dream too of having a daughter myself one day.  Of course I will tell her that she can be anything she wants, but I hope she doesn’t take me at my word.  I hope it is the images and portraits of strong, successful and intelligent women around her that convince her of its truth.  I want my daughter to know that women count.  They must count.  And it is time we call on Washington to account for the rightful representation of half of our population.