Rep. Pramila Jayapal:
Well, first of all, you can just look at numbers.
I'm the first South Asian-American woman ever to serve in Congress. I am also one out of 14 immigrants out of 535 naturalized now serving. And, you know, if you look at the history of Congress, over 11,000 people have served. There have been only been 79 women of color who have ever served in Congress. And so just that tells you the barriers that exist.
But when you get here — and it's difficult enough getting here, the fund-raising, the way the system works, the lack of leadership ladders, until fairly recently, I would say, but, also, once you get here, this is a very male, very white institution.
It is getting on in age in many ways, and we have made a big difference over the last four years that I have been here. But a lot of the structures are still built for a certain kind of power, and they are built with institutional racism and sexism built into the operation.
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