A Record Number Of Women Will Serve In Congress (With Potentially More To Come)

After Tuesday's elections, a record number of women will serve in Congress come January 2019.

With results still coming in, 94 women have won or are projected to win their House races as of early Wednesday morning, up from the current 84. In addition, at least 13 women won Senate seats. That's in addition to the 10 female senators who were not up for re-election this year.

That means at least 117 women will serve in the 116th Congress, up from the current 107. And it will bring the share of Congress members who are women up from the current 20 percent to at least 22 percent.

These new records represent the culmination of a record-setting year for female candidates. In elections for Congress, governorships and state legislatures alike, the number of women who ran outstripped previous years, as did the number of women nominated.

Many first-time candidates this year were inspired to run for office, at least in part, by the 2016 presidential election — both the fact that the first female major-party nominee ever lost, and that Donald Trump, who is very unpopular among women (particularly Democratic women), won.