[ti:Number of Female Lawmakers in US Grows, But Still Low+++美国女议员人数有所增长多但还是为数不多] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:00.08]Although Hillary Clinton did not become [00:03.64]the first woman to be elected president of the United States, [00:08.60]there are now more female state legislators than ever before. [00:15.00]Beginning in January 2017, [00:19.57]about 1,824 women will serve in the legislatures of the 50 states [00:27.92]-- the highest number in American history. [00:31.60]That is 24.7 percent of the more than 7,380 state house and senate seats. [00:42.32]In 1992, 20 percent of state legislators were women. [00:50.08]By 2015, 24.4 percent of them were. [00:56.88]A record number of women were candidates this year for state legislative seats. [01:04.36]The legislatures of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada [01:10.24]and Vermont have the highest percentage of women. [01:14.81]Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming have the lowest percentage. [01:23.73]About 20 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress are women. [01:30.31]Women make up a little more than half of the U.S. population. [01:36.79]However, the 2016 election did not bring the big change [01:43.56]in the number of women in politics that some people expected, says Debbie Walsh. [01:50.72]She is the director of the nonpartisan Center [01:54.97]for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. [02:00.36]She recently spoke with the Washington Post newspaper. [02:06.10]"For all of the talk of this being a change election, [02:11.40]it was not a change election for women in politics. [02:15.64]We just aren't seeing enough of them," she said. [02:20.73]The elections did bring some "firsts" for female lawmakers. [02:27.51]Starting in January 2017, 38 non-white women will serve in Congress. [02:37.44]That is a record number. [02:40.68]Thirty-five of them are Democrats and three are Republicans. [02:47.16]Democrat Catherine Cortez Mastro of Nevada [02:52.64]will be the first Latina to serve in the U.S. Senate. [02:57.70]And Stephanie Murphy, a Democrat from Florida, [03:02.16]will be the first Vietnamese-American woman in Congress. [03:07.60]All of the members of the U.S. House and Senate [03:12.50]from the state of New Hampshire will be women. [03:16.79]Voters in Minnesota elected the first Somali-American state lawmaker. [03:24.72]Voters in Kentucky elected its first black female legislator in 20 years. [03:33.85]Forty Native American Democratic state legislators [03:39.32]were also elected in states throughout the country. [03:43.69]Only two of the 50 American states have never elected a woman [03:50.12]to serve in the U.S. House or Senate: Mississippi and Vermont. [03:57.44]The new Congress will be the most diverse group of American lawmakers ever. [04:06.03]However, about 80 percent of its members will be white males. [04:14.12]White men are about 31 percent of the U.S. population. [04:20.96]I'm Marsha James.