Most of the effective members of Congress wear skirts

Image via Cosmopolitan.

Cosmopolitan article asks: "Why Aren't the Extra-Effective Women of the U.S. Senate Getting the Credit They Deserve?"

"About that do-nothing Congress: There are actually some members who are doing something, and most of them wear skirts to work."

Jill Filipovic writes:

Elizabeth Warren is a big name in the U.S. Senate today, but she almost didn't run at all.

Before her election in 2012, Warren was one of the legal world's most-cited scholars, an expert in bankruptcy, and a law professor at Harvard. After the economic crash of 2008, she came to Washington, D.C., to champion the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren was a leading candidate to run the agency until Congressional Republicans objected. So Warren packed up to leave Capitol Hill and return to Harvard.

Warren, a Democrat, raised $39 million for her campaign, more than any other Senate candidate that year, and became Massachusetts's first female senator. Her career, she says, was made by "one woman helping another."

What's it like to be a woman in the Senate in 2015? Cosmopolitan invited the 20 sitting female senators to talk about that, and 16 of them took us up on the offer. In a series of interviews in Washington, D.C., they told us stories similar to Warren's. But they didn't describe a soft-focus sisterhood that propels them to work together. Instead, many of them said they've tapped into a style of collaborative leadership for one simple reason: It works.

 Although they're a minority on Capitol Hill, the women of the Senate are among the country's most effective elected officials, working across the aisle more often than the Senate's men and keeping an increasingly fractured Congress creaking along ... even when, as they admit themselves, they don't always get the credit.

Read more: