Before Hillary Clinton came "out of the woods" this week and encouraged women to run for office, they had already started signing up to do so in droves.
In one of her first public appearances since she lost the presidential election, Hillary Clinton took to the stage at a San Francisco conference for businesswomen on Tuesday, encouraging women to "get in the arena" and run for higher office.
During her campaign, Clinton promised to fill half of her Cabinet with women. On Tuesday, Clinton criticized Trump, whom she did not mention by name, for having so few women in high-level jobs, with just four women holding Cabinet-level positions out of 23.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that Donald Trump's Cabinet is shaping up to be more white and male than any first Cabinet since Ronald Reagan's, but in an every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining moment, Trump's election appears to be galvanizing more women to run for office.
I think there is a very good chance that come 2018, we will see a real increase in the number of women running.
"What we're seeing is a real interest on the part of women post the 2016 election to be active and engaged citizens and to have a voice," Deborah Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, tells BillMoyers.com.
This enthusiasm is being felt by similar organizations including Emily's List, which works to advance Democratic women running for office. According to Alexandra De Luca, deputy press secretary at Emily's List, since Trump's election more than 10,000 women have contacted her organization expressing an interest in running for local or state office. That number represents an "unprecedented," tenfold increase compared to the two years leading up to the 2016 election.
"I think that women are seeing now more than ever that the incredibly tangible, powerful way they can fight back is to run for office and that's why we're seeing so many women on Nov. 9 that said, 'What can I do?'" De Luca says.
The US ranks 104th in the world for women's representation in government.
There's definitely a lot of ground to make up. Less than a quarter of elected officials nationwide are women, and there was zero growth in terms of the number of women in the US Congress after the 2016 election. While half the nation is made up of women and girls, they are represented by a Congress that is made up of just 20 percent of women.
The US ranks 104th in the world for women's representation in government out of a total of 190 countries, according to data compiled by the Inter-Parliamentary Union. That's down from 52nd in the world just two decades ago.
Following Clinton's loss, Walsh says she was concerned that women might be discouraged that the first woman to win a major political party's presidential nomination came up short. She also feared that women would be so "disgusted and turned off by the tone and the tenor of that campaign" that they would not want to run for office.
Vice President Pence tweeted this photo on Thursday, March 23, 2017.
It's something the former head of the 4,350-employee Utah Department of Human Services, Lisa Michele Church, a lifelong Republican, can relate to. She recalls her own experience with men making decisions that overwhelmingly affect women.
In 2008, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. (R-UT) and his male advisers decided to mandate a 10-hour, four-day workweek for all state employees, with just a few weeks notice given to workers. The few women in Huntsman's Cabinet, including Church, were not asked to be part of the decision-making process.
On the flip side, Church says she saw women legislators in Utah advocate for issues such as HPV vaccines and midwifery standards that male legislators were not raising.
It's not necessarily that men don't care about such issues; they simply bring a different set of life experiences to public policymaking, which in turn influence their priorities.
"I don't want to make it sound like they're just all sort of a Kumbaya crowd, but they are more likely to be able to work across the party aisle. And sometimes it's not even on policy but they can build a relationship that can be useful down the road," Walsh says.
The best example of that, she says, is the monthly dinners held in Washington, DC, by the women in the US Senate. The senators say these are casual affairs where work isn't discussed, but by meeting regularly the US Democratic and Republican senators get to know one another better and build bonds.
Whether Republican or Democratic, the thousands of women who are interested in running for office, may be inspired by Clinton's parting words on Tuesday. She shared a "little mantra" that she's been saying to herself lately, discovered on long walks in the woods.