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"It&amp;#x27;s only Thursday, but it&amp;#x27;s already been a pretty amazing week for women, with strides in the political and business arenas. Exhibit A: With today&amp;#x27;s swearing in of Massachusetts special-election winner Katherine Clark (below), women now hold a record 99 seats (D-76, R-23) in Congress&amp;amp;mdash;20 in the Senate and 79 in the House. It happened like this: Clark won a special election to fill the congressional seat held by longtime Democratic U.S. Rep. Edward Markey, who won a special election to fill the Senate seat left open after John Kerry was named secretary of state. (Got that?) Now, the Center for American Women and Politics (part of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University) reports that women will hold 18.5 percent of seats in Congress overall. These are great gains, but remember, women account for more than 50 percent of the population. &amp;quot;While we&amp;#x27;re edging close to 100 [women in congress] for the first time, we&amp;#x27;re still far from parity,&amp;quot; said CAWP director Debbie Walsh. On the business front, General Motors announced on Tuesday that Mary Barra was promoted to chief executive officer. She&amp;#x27;s the first woman to run a major automaker in the U.S. She&amp;#x27;s currently executive vice president of global product development and global purchasing and supply chain and has been with the company for 33 years. (Note to job hoppers: Sometimes loyalty can pay off!) According to CNN, she is the &amp;quot;rare executive who doesn&amp;#x27;t ignore common sense when faced with a complicated problem.&amp;quot; That brings the number of women running Fortune 500 companies to 23. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/inspired/blogs/the-conversation/2013/12/who-runs-the>